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COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY STUDIES IN ENGLISH 
AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 



DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 
SENSATION NOVELISTS 



COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 
SALES AGENTS 

NEW YORK 

LEMCKE & BUECHNER 
30-32 East 2*th Street 

LONDON 

HUMPHREY InIILFORD 
Amen Corner, E.G. 

SHANGHAI 

EDWARD EVANS & SONS, Ltd. 

30 North Szechuen Road 



DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

SENSATIOIs^ NOVELISTS 



A STUDY IN THE CONDITIONS AND 

THEORIES OF NOVEL WRITING 

IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND 



BY 



WALTER C. PHILLIPS, Ph.D. 



m^ 




il2tto Sorfe 

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 
1919 

All rights reserved 

LEWCKE4BUECHNER 
30-32 East 20th St. Naui York 






Copyright, 1919 
By Columbia University Press 



Printed from type, May, 1919 




THE PLIMPTON PRESS • NORWOOD • MASS • U • 3 • A 



JUN 20 1^19 

©CI.A525940 



r: 



TO THOSE 
WHO MADE THIS STUDY POSSIBLE 



PREFACE 

Dickens once condemned a doctrinaire preface by his 
friend Collins on the principle that a book of all things 
ought to stand by itself. Such admirable sense, it seems, 
ought to be heeded generally, especially by those who from 
time to time with great labor perpetrate books about better 
books. But the temerity apparent in writing about Dickens 
at all nowadays will probably seem equal to a preface in the 
true Victorian manner. If such an attempt is not to need 
apology, it certainly requires definition. 

Hitherto the study of Victorian letters has been confined 
almost entirely to biography and esthetics. Yet as a matter 
of common knowledge that which distinguishes Victorian 
from other times, and chiefly explains the problems in its 
esthetics, is the social and intellectual change which made 
the many arbiters of taste. It is common knowledge that 
this revolution made novel and periodical the favorite 
literary forms. But the specific ways in which it affected 
the writer of fiction — the opportunities and ideals it en- 
couraged, the changes it wrought in narrative form, the 
interaction of periodical and novel upon each other — have 
never been stated connectedly. The object of this study is 
an outline statement of these new forces as they affected 
Dickens and his followers. It aims primarily to present the 
problems and opportunities of fiction-writing as the Vic- 
torians saw them sixty years ago. The book purports to 
be nothing more than a beginning upon a broad subject. 
To blaze a trail through the wilderness of trade conditions 
from 1800 to 1850 is difficult, for in the present state of 

vii 



viii PREFACE 

bibliography the results depend somewhat upon diligence, 
more upon chance. Moreover, the narrative is incomplete 
without reference to the French, who had earlier experi- 
mented in low prices and periodical publications. Twenty- 
five years hence, when this chaotic period is better known, 
the generaUzations in this study will have been reinforced 
and elaborated, I hope, not changed. Likewise, leaving 
aside natural inclination of the Dickensians to the theatrical, 
the tradition of diabolism in English prose romance does not 
entirely account for their sensationalism. There are obscure, 
intangible influences from the French here also. These are 
by no means exhausted by Reade's known appropriation 
of French narrative. After Scott, say in Ains worth, English 
prose romance was experimenting; and how much or in 
what manner Dickens's followers later were affected by 
Victor Hugo and Eugene Sue there is little means of saying. 
At the end of the task it is pleasant to acknowledge kind- 
nesses encountered in its course. I owe thanks to the staff 
at the Columbia University Library and to that of the John 
Hay Library in Providence for pains in making available ob- 
scure novels and obscurer magazines, especially to Mr. T. P. 
Ayer, while he was reference librarian at Brown, and later 
to Miss E. R. Blanchard, his successor. Mr. Crawford of 
The Toronto Globe enabled me to obtain some controversial 
papers of Reade which have not been reprinted. Dr. Robert 
S. Forsythe of Adelbert College kindly called my attention 
to some obscure but significant facts which I had missed. 
Some years ago a preceptor of my undergraduate study, 
Professor G. W. Benedict of Brown, stimulated my interest 
in Reade, and to him I am indebted for various useful hints 
during the writing. Professor G. P. Krapp of Columbia also 
aided in the formation of several chapters. My chief debt 
is to Professor A. H. Thorndike, whose interest in the study 
and whose helpfulness have been invaluable. For judicious 



PREFACE IX 

help in the difficult places, which have been numerous, for 
unfailing counsel and pains in the formation of the manu- 
script, I have reason to thank him generously. The nature 
of such debt students of English at Columbia can best 

appreciate. 

W. C. P. 

PROvroENCE, May, 1918 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Preliminary: The Sensational in Modern English 

Prose Fiction 1 

1. The Appeal to Fear in the Modern English Novel. . 1 

2. Victorian Sensation Novels 14 

II. The Background of Sensationalism 37 

Foreword 37 

3. The Rise of Cheap Books 38 

4. The Novelist as Wage Earner 57 

5. Miscellany and Serial Fiction 68 

6. Novelist and Public 91 

Summary 106 

III. The School of Dickens 109 

7. The Literary Fraternalism of Dickens, Reade, and 
Collins 109 

8. Their Creed of Fiction 124 

IV. The Native Tradition of Terrorism in the English 

Novel 152 

Foreword 152 

9. I. The First Phase of the Bjrronic Hero 155 

II. The Byronic Hero discredited in "Newgate 

Novels" 164 

10. The Common Characteristics of the Dickensians as 

Sensationalists i 181 

1 1 . Reade's Reduction of Sensation Principles to Absurdity 201 

Summary 218 

bibliography 223 



DICKEI^S, EEADE, AI^D COLLIIS S 

SENSATION NOVELISTS 

CHAPTER I 

THE SENSATIONAL ELEMENT IN MODERN 
ENGLISH FICTION 

1. The Appeal to Fear in Modern English Prose Fiction 

In a Winter Courtship Sarah Orne Jewett relates the 
manner in which Jefferson Briley, an aged New England 
mail-driver, was taken on the road, despite his formidable 
pistol, by a widow as sere and yellow as himself. Eighteen 
' years of his seven-mile route daily except Sundays, behind 
a mare who was not young when she and her master under- 
took the task together, has driven Jefferson to revolt from 
a prosy lot. On this chilly winter morning, as he drives 
along with Widow Tobin for a passenger, he regales her 
with narratives about the desperadoes of the West. His 
fancy lingers fondly on the exhilarating dangers to the 
driver as the coach swings crazily above yawning canons 
and down mountainous declivities. To the best of descrip- 
tive powers, based obviously upon no small acquaintance 
with the Jesse James style of frontier romance, he pictures 
ihe robbing of the express car by masked bandits, and 
speculates naively on the manner of men these terrible fel- 
lows are . in their less picturesque hours. That, Jefferson 

1 



2 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

remarks very disingenuously, is the life he would see in his 
declining years. ''Men folks be brave by nature," sighs the 
widow, though she knows better, and draws poor tame old 
Jefferson into her net. Jefferson's wild visions end in a 
meek surrender a second time to the marital yoke; but his 
literary leanings are typical of the modern reader. Nowa- 
days, when everybody reads, and there is something for 
everybody to read, popular literature of necessity is frag- 
mentary, sentimental, and sensational. The millions, like 
Jefferson Briley, look to it to provide the variety and the 
adventurous experience which life itself does not bring. 
When the business of existence is prone to arrange itself 
into so many hours daily of shop, counter, or desk, popular 
fiction, whether in form of drama, novel, or moving-picture 
film, must meet a perennial demand for violent emotional 
thrills. Whatever sources of appeal may come or go, there 
is one which from the very structure of modern democratic 
society seldom bids for applause unheeded — that is, the 
appeal to fear. 

In English fiction this appeal has been notably significant 
since Walpole's Castle of Otranto. From the preface to the 
second edition of that novel we learn that the story repre- 
sented a conscious and deliberate revolt from "a strict ad- 
herence to common life" because such adherence had 
dammed up the resources of fancy. The appeal to fear has 
been especially insistent in our fiction for slightly less than 
a century — it may be said to have found more cogent and 
more popular expression in Dickens than it enjoyed before, 
partly because Dickens himself was a democrat in a sense 
that none of his great English contemporary rivals were, 
and partly because his beginning as a man of letters was 
coincident with the most notable extension of the reading 
public and of reading since the Renaissance. In its origin, 
then, a literary reaction from the canons of the age of prose 



THE SENSATIONAL IN MODERN ENGLISH FICTION 3 

and reason, the appeal to fear, primarily through this 
extraordinary enlargement of the circle of readers, becomes 
a stock appeal of modern popular novels. 

The magnitude of this extension of the public can best be 
suggested by figures. At the end of Chapter 26, volume 8, 
of his Popular History of England, Charles Knight quotes 
an estimate by Burke that in the final decade of the 
eighteenth century habitual readers in England numbered 
from 80,000 to 90,000.^ In 1832, five years before the appear- 
ance of Pickwick in shilling numbers, The Penny Magazine, 
published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowl- 
edge, attained a circulation of 200,000; and was estimated 
by its historian, Charles Knight, to have had a million 
readers. In 1838 The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick 
Club, as contrasted with The Penny Magazine, a private 
venture in entertaining literature, were selling to the extent 
of about 40,000 copies of the monthly issues. Slightly later, 
when Dickens embarked upon periodical literature inde- 
pendently, in Master Humphrey's Clock, the public, believ- 
ing that the title promised a new novel, bought 70,000 copies 
of the first issue. Twenty years later yet, The Cornhill, a 
shilling magazine edited by Thackeray, disposed of about 
110,000 numbers of its first issue, and then settled back 
to a permanent subscription list of from 80,000 to 90,000; 
or, roughly, a subscriber for every reader that had existed 
sixty or seventy years earlier. The full significance of the 
sales of Thackeray's magazine does not appear unless we 
recall that another very popular and able shilling miscellany, 
Macmillan's Magazine, with Professor Masson as editor, 
began at almost the same time, with almost equal success. 

1 Professor W. P. Trent, an acknowledged authority on minutiae 
of eighteenth-century bibliography, is of the opinion that the number 
is too small. Knight quotes the same figures in Passages of a Working 
Life, vol. 2, ch. 9, p. 184. 



4 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

How many fold the million readers of the Reform year had 
increased in these flourishing days of cheap periodicals no 
one knows. Knight, the best authority, calls the figures 
from mid-century ''unmanageable." 

Beneath these scattered facts lies the essential explanation 
of the disproportionate esteem of fiction and periodicals — 
of ''the casual, the trivial, and the sensational" — that 
marked Victorian literature and that marks our own. A 
new public with new tastes effected the complete remaking 
of trade in printed matter and a new and unheard-of scale 
of remuneration for popular writers. In this readjustment 
no single figure was more influential than Dickens, both as 
a story-teller and as a purveyor of novel and cheap mis- 
cellany. More than his rivals he adapted his art and the 
means of disseminating it to the new possibilities that were 
opening before writers who could at once please and lead 
the new taste. 1837, the year when Pickwick began in 
shilling numbers, was a fortunate time. The more pretentious 
magazines like Blackwood^s, Fraser^s, and Colburn's New 
Monthly were firmly established with middle-class readers; 
the reduction of the paper tax, which made possible cheaper 
and more popular periodicals, like Bentley^s Miscellany and 
those which Dickens later owned and edited, had just been 
made. Weekly critical journals like The Literary Gazette 
(1817), The Athenaeum, and The Spectator (both begun in 
1828), combining in a popular way the advantages of the 
elaborate articles in the quarterlies with those of the daily 
editorial, were already offering records of current politics, 
literature, and art. Yet the overwhelming popularity of the 
novel was still delayed. The number of novels appearing 
between 1815 and 1850 was by no means disproportionate. 
According to Knight,^ during those years there had been 
pubHshed in England 10,300 volumes of divinity; 4900 of 
1 Popular History of England, vol. VIII, note to ch. 26. 



THE SENSATIONAL IN MODERN ENGLISH FICTION 5 

history and geography; 3500 of fiction; 3400 of drama and 
poetry; 2500 of scientific works; and 2460 devoted to the 
arts. Still, if its production had not been excessive, there 
long had been a growing awareness among writers that the 
novel could be made to serve serious purposes for readers 
who were not cultivated. Godwin's preface to Caleb Wil- 
liams makes clear that the story intended dramatization of 
some ideas from Political Justice for those who never read 
philosophy. Bulwer in 1830 had begun the vogue of what 
Professor Cazamain calls le Roman social with Paul Clifford, 
an attack upon the penal code. Disraeli, finding his political 
program unpalatable to the public in pamphlet form, em- 
bodied it in his trilogy of purpose novels, Coningshy, Sybil, 
and Tancred. By the time of Oliver Twist it was well under- 
stood that the novel might readily be made to serve a cause 
or a personal ambition. 

Yet a novelist beginning about 1840, though he set his 
course as skillfully as Dickens ultimately did in the channel 
of new opportunities, could not escape great indebtedness 
to the waning romance. Writing professedly with the new 
elements of the literary audience in mind, and adapting his 
fiction as well to new methods of publication, he was more 
indebted to that waning romance than criticism has gener- 
ally indicated. The reasons for this oversight are obvious 
and critically correct. Dickens was not only the successor 
of Scott and Byron, but he was also the delineator of the 
byways and eccentric folk of mid-century London. And 
so great was his originality in this province of his art that 
it has tended to obscure the kind and quality of plot he 
employed. The customary dicta of critics who look back to 
Smollett and Ben Jonson for kindred methods and charac- 
ters describe only one aspect of his fiction. As to the stories 
he told as such, criticism has varied little; in the novelist's 
own day, Bagehot, Lewes, and Ruskin recognized and 



6 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

deprecated the qualities that a new school has designated 
in the same terms — as melodramatic and sensational. 

Historically, in so far as this sensational tendency belongs 
solely to literary history, and forms a narrative tradition, 
its course can be indicated in few words. From the end of 
the eighteenth century, when makers of fiction followed the 
direction of Walpole's revolt, and adopted the appeal to 
fear as a primary motive, some of the best powers of inven- 
tion for the next six or seven decades were devoted chiefly 
to the elaboration of a terrible protagonist, half human, half 
demoniac. The terror that he inspired was the direct measure 
of his success. As in all revolt the first manifestations were 
most violent, and its results are least credible as reflections 
of conceivable human experience; the favorite figure of 
such romances was originally supernatural or else was 
brought into direct encounter with supernatural forces; 
then, like Lara and the early heroes of Bulwer-Lytton, a 
frankly human being of ambiguous moral nature, partly 
admirable, mostly vicious; and finally the stereotyped 
villain of melodramatic stage and shilling-shocker. In such 
a revolt the principles upon which it depends originally 
have only the most general definition; they rest upon the 
conviction that existing ideals are despicable and intolerable. 
To trace the influence of this revolt is to indicate the develop- 
ment of the sensational, melodramatic element in modern 
English prose fiction to its culmination in the novels of 
Dickens and his chief satellites; for they inherited the 
results of this experimentation, and formulated it in accord- 
ance with the life and taste of their own day. 

There is, then, no want of continuity between the romance 
that Walpole and the Terrorists wrote at the end of the 
eighteenth century, and that which Dickens and his followers 
wrote in the middle of the nineteenth. Its pathway lies 
through the domain of Byron and of Scott, and its goal is 



THE SENSATIONAL IN MODERN ENGLISH FICTION 7 

melodrama which approaches the stage variety. Scott, a 
keen student of prose romance, saw the direction of the 
method for which Mrs. Radchffe won respect. Toward the 
end of his memoir of that lady, he remarked: ''The species 
of romance which Mrs. Radcliffe introduced bears nearly 
the same relation to the novel that the modern anomaly 
entitled a 'melo-drama' does to the proper drama. It does 
not appeal to the judgment by a deep delineation of human 
feeling, or stir the passions by scenes of deep pathos, or 
awaken the fancy by tracing out with spirit and vivacity 
the lighter traces of life and manners, or excite mirth by 
strong representations of the ludicrous or humorous. In 
other words it attains its interest neither by the path of 
comedy nor of tragedy; and yet it has a deep, decided, and 
powerful effect, gained by means independent of both — by 
an appeal, in one word, to fear, whether excited by natural 
dangers or by the suggestions of superstition. The force, 
therefore, of the production lies in the delineation of external 
incident, while the characters of the agents . . . are entirely 
subordinate to the scenes in which they are placed. . . . The 
persons introduced — and here also the correspondence holds 
betwixt the melo-drama and the romantic novel — bear the 
features, not of individuals, but of the class to which they 
belong." Now when the force of the production depends 
upon external incident, there is a new emphasis upon arti- 
ficial plot. Moreover, when the novelist works with the 
Faust motive and with personages half human, half demoniac, 
like Maturin's Melmoth, solutions of the plot such as those 
in The Monk, where Satan comes in person to claim the 
false priest Ambrosio, or in Melmoih, where the protagonist 
disappears in thin air over the Irish Sea, are inevitable and 
appropriate. The conditions of the story are unintelligi- 
ble, humanly speaking, and so is the conclusion. When the 
crime is the sale of a soul, the hangman is impotent. But 



8 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

when supernatural themes are discredited, as they were by 
the twenties, the narrator was unwilUng to forego the ad- 
vantages he had derived from superstition and theology. If 
the fiend could no longer carry off Ambrosio in 1840, the 
novelist could invoke opportune shipwreck or bolt of light- 
ning to achieve the same result. 

The contribution of Byron and of Scott to the sensational 
tradition consists essentially in rationalizing and rendering 
more credible the characteristically supernatural melo- 
drama of the Terrorists. From it Byron borrowed the 
ruffianly hero whom he celebrated under half a dozen names. 
The villain of The Castle of Udolpho, elaborated into Schedoni, 
the false monk in The Italian, becomes the hero of The Giaour 
and Lara. Mrs. Rad cliff e had progressively diminished 
suggestions of the supernatural through her novels, so that 
Schedoni, when Byron appropriated him, was almost en- 
tirely divested of it. Byron made his melodrama frankly 
mundane, and successfully substituted a more or less genu- 
ine oriental atmosphere for haunted Gothic castle, monas- 
tery, and other machinery of crude terror. In neither 
Byron nor Scott does the melodrama exist for its own sake. 
In Lara and the companion pieces it provides an appro- 
priate narrative framework for exploitation of Byron's 
'' Satanic" ego. Yet if it is, strictly speaking, subordinate 
in Byron's design, its value, from the conception of the 
character the stories illustrate, is directly dependent upon 
its luridity and violence. The more terrific the incidents 
of the intrigue, the greater the likelihood of vividly impress- 
ing the ruffianly hero. Immediately, indeed, Byron's influ- 
ence upon fiction was not less than Scott's; in the tradition 
with which this study is concerned it was indubitably far 
stronger. Its narrative methods and values, which more 
than others determined the character of Victorian ''sensa- 
tion fiction," are detailed in a later chapter. 



THE SENSATIONAL IN MODERN ENGLISH FICTION 9 

Scott, it has appeared, was a keen analyst of Terrorism. 
Being no less a shrewd judge of what the readers of his 
novels wanted, he perceived much in Gothicism that was 
highly useful, and sought material analogous to that of the 
Terrorists for similar effects. He was constantly dressing 
up his historical dramas with the kind of melodramatic inci- 
dent that delighted Dickens and Reade. Working mainly 
in the dramatic stories of history, Scott freely employed the 
romancer's license in favor of sensationalism. He carried 
on the popular taste for terror in a series of studies based 
upon Scotch superstition. In Guy Mannering, the prophecy 
and curse of Meg Merrilies, the ruin where she protects 
Harry Bertram from the smugglers and gypsies while Hat- 
teraick's mate is dying, the Kaim of Derncleugh, the only 
place where Meg's spirit can free itself from the flesh, and 
the strange fulfillment of Mannering's horoscope for young 
Ellangowan are peculiarly Gothic effects. Guy Mannering 
indeed might be styled a Gothic novel as written by a man 
of sense. But Scott knew that popular superstition as a 
source of sensational appeal was becoming stale and unprofit- 
able. He records his dubiety about later experiments in 
the preface to The Monastery, dated November, 1830. Here, 
he says, ''From the discredit attached to the vulgar and more 
common modes in which Scotch superstition displays itself, 
the Author was induced to have recourse to the beautiful, 
though almost forgotten, theory of astral spirits"; but the 
result. The White Lady of Avenel, was, he realizes, a failure. 
''Either the Author executed his purpose badly, or the public 
did not approve of it." Scott thought both explanations 
true. He admits that The Monastery is a badly constructed 
story. For the rest, he very significantly remarks : " Machin- 
ery remained — the introduction of the supernatural and 
marvelous, the resort of distressed authors since the days of 
Horace, but whose privileges as a sanctuary have been dis- 
puted in the present age and well-nigh exploded." 



10 DICKENS. READE, AND COLLINS 

As has been intimated, Scott's chief contribution to sensa- 
tional narrative as it persisted into Victorian times Ues 
elsewhere. He had no scruples about altering specific his- 
torical fact if he could thereby achieve a narrative effect. 
He extends the life of the villainous De la Marck in Quentin 
Durward four years beyond the time history assigns in order 
to kill him off dramatically. In Kenilworth, he bases the 
account of the Countess Amy's death upon a chronicle 
quite at variance with the findings of the court which tried 
Leicester. Furthermore, he grafted episodes originally un- 
connected with his story upon it for sensational effect. 
There is a striking example in Old Mortality in young Mor- 
ton's escape from the fanatical Cameronians. After the 
Covenanters were routed at Bothwell Bridge, Morton acci- 
dentally asked shelter in a house where ten of the fanatics 
had taken refuge. The young man had already roused their 
hatred by refusal to assent to their extreme measures; and 
now that Providence had given him into their hands, the 
Cameronians felt that the best service they could do their 
cause in the day of defeat was to rid it of a lukewarm 
adherent. As it is Sunday evening, however, they resolve 
not to carry out the butchery until after midnight, though 
their zeal brooks the delay very ill. The most militant of 
the captors is already hastening the hands of the timepiece 
toward twelve, when Cuddie Headrigg breaks in, accom- 
panied by a band of Claverhouse's redcoats. This deferring 
the execution until the close of the Sabbath was appropri- 
ated, according to Scott's note, from the contemporary 
experience of a Scotch exciseman with the smugglers. 

Scott, then, as he affects sensational methods of narrative, 
though not immediately more potent than Byron, was, 
like him, a rationalizing force. Byron discarded supernatural- 
ism in favor of sentimental villainy in an oriental setting; 
Scott experimented with substitutes for supernaturalism. 



THE SENSATIONAL IN MODERN ENGLISH FICTION 11 

and ultimately left models shorn alike of diabolism and of 
sentimental villainy. It is this use of the romancer's license 
with reservation that constitutes Scott's great contribution 
to the method of narrative we are considering. Before 
broken health brought the Waverley series to a close, he 
had indicated in Kenilworth, Old Mortality, Quentin Durward, 
Redgauntlet a self-respecting road for the appeal to fear. 
Still, no more than in Byron was melodrama the end and 
aim of the narrative; with Scott it is the spice intended to 
give additional zest to the historical dramas in which he 
generally works. Both romancers perceived its great utiUty 
— both employed and developed it ; neither gave it code or 
formulas. 

When Scott died the old set of romantic motives in fiction 
were fast breaking down. Simultaneously with the dis- 
integration came the rise of the great uncultivated audience. 
The resultant uncertainty and ambiguity of purpose in 
Ainsworth and Bulwer will later be noted as of importance 
in the development of the sensational method. Dickens, 
the plot-maker, as opposed to Dickens the delineator of 
human oddities, brought down to date the essential appeal 
of The Romance of the Forest, and adapted it to the preju- 
dices, credulity, and taste of the audience for which he wrote. 
In the work of his 'prentice hand, notably in Oliver Twist 
and in Barnaby Rudge, this kinship with older patterns of 
romance lies at the surface. But the charnel-house horrors 
of Oliver are by no means exceptional in his narrative. From 
the scene in which Sikes brutally murders his mistress through 
the opium-tainted atmosphere of Edwin Drood, there is no 
full-length story of his without its generous reliance upon 
the most brutal stimulants to fear. 

Indeed, reliance upon such material was a canon of art 
for Dickens and those who followed most ably and most 
closely in his steps. Together with Wilkie Collins and 
Charles Reade, who by the early fifties had reinforced him 



12 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

by adoption of his narrative preferences and practices, he 
gave the sensational tendency in our fiction a creed and defi- 
nite methods. This creed, however, has no single prole- 
gomena. Still, few or no long inferences are necessary to 
ascertain their theories of their art, for they left in various 
incidental pieces, such as letters, controversial pieces, and 
criticisms of contemporaries or of each other, intelligible 
enough record. All this incidental criticism is defined by 
their consistent and unequivocal practice. 

Examination of these documents gives a new definiteness 
to the term The School of Dickens. For such entertainment 
as they provided they had tolerably definite formulas. These 
formulas disclose not only an essential unity of ideas among 
our triumvirate, but also afford a key to much in crafts- 
manship that seems grotesque, violent, and theatrical, as 
well as to much that seems strangely vivid and masterly in 
adroitness of narrative manipulation. They write, as they 
tell us, the romance of the here and now, not for the culti- 
vated or the sophisticated, but for the public — the w^hole 
public. No single utterance of theirs is perhaps more sig- 
nificant of their joint aims and preferences than that which 
Collins prefixed to Basil, his second novel. ''Believing that 
the novel and the play are twin-sisters in the family of 
fiction ; and that one is drama narrated as the other is drama 
acted; and that all the deep . . . strong emotions that the 
play-writer is privileged to excite, the novel writer is priv- 
ileged to excite also, I have not thought it necessary ... to 
adhere to everyday realities only." Strong emotions, un- 
usual incident, dramatic method — such preferences recall 
perhaps the storm in Copperfield, the execution of Carton, 
the homecoming of Gerard the monk, and many more, not 
a few of which ill accord with the standards of present-day 
taste. CoUins's parallel of the theater, in fact, points to the 
narrative method which they persistently championed. At 



THE SENSATIONAL IN MODERN ENGLISH FICTION 13 

bottom their method aimed, by means of adapting to the 
novel some of the advantages and necessary restraint of 
play-writing, to impart a vivacity and verisimilitude hitherto 
insufficiently developed in English prose fiction. Specifically 
the characters must express themselves by words and act 
more than had been the custom; they must be expressed 
by the writer's comments less. Again, the full emotional 
value of the material was to be stressed as the theater stresses 
it. Hence climaxes arranged on the stage plan. Whether 
or not these arose necessarily from the characters in the 
narrative is secondary with the Dickens group. They and 
their audience, one suspects, often found the fortuitous more 
appalling than the logical. If then for Collins's word drama 
we read melodrama, we have roughly what our trio meant 
by the parallel, and can understand whj^ they were fond of 
describing their own novels as dramatic. 

Sensationalism, or the sensation novel, as Victorian re- 
viewers dubbed it, had, then, a fairly definite meaning and 
a long literary tradition. It was romance of the present 
consciously adapted to new conditions and to new public; 
and found, like its prototype, material in records of crime 
and villainy. These in some measure for their own sake it 
consciously stresses in the adventures of a Lara, Red- 
gauntlet, Fagin, Riderhood, Count Fosco. Its great ex- 
ponents in Victorian times were Dickens, Reade, and Collins, 
whose specialized narrative form effected its highest develop- 
ment. Their example found numerous imitators, most of 
whom lacked their facility and power, some of whom were 
quite destitute of their sense of the responsibilities of the 
artist. In the hands of these, sensation writing became the 
reproach and abomination of Victorian popular literature. 
Critic and moralist alike descried in it the collapse of taste 
and truth in the novel, and pointed their finger at Dickens 
with the accusatory "Thou art the man." 



'^ 



14 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

With this outhne of the rise and nature of Victorian 
sensational narrative in mind, we may proceed to a more 
extended account of the form it took two generations ago 
and of its heyday in the Enghsh novel. 

2. Victorian Sensation Novels 

Consideration of the sensational trend in Dickens's work 
necessarily restricts to that which is least admirable in his 
art. The best recent criticism, such as Gissing's, Chester- 
ton's, and Professor Hugh Walker's, has especially insisted 
on an idea which Bagehot expressed in 1858. It has become 
a truism that when Dickens is chiefly concerned with plot, 
his favorite description of himself as ''the inimitable" is 
highly ambiguous. Here it is precisely with the narrative 
art that we have to do — with plot, the handling of incident, 
and the narrative rhetoric. Not Pickwick, the inexhaustible 
humor, or the vivid knowledge of London; but the death 
of Little Nell, the finding of Steerforth's bodj^, the spon- 
taneous combustion of Krook, the murder of Nance, the 
execution of Carton, are the material — this is the sen- 
sation stuff that could be and was widely imitated by- 
lesser men. 

For general illustration of the Dickensian sensationalism, 
that preface by Collins previously referred to, which insists 
upon the parallelism of novel and play, the portrayal of 
strong emotions, and selection of incident not bounded by 
everyday probabilities, furnishes a helpful guide. This 
quality, as has been intimated, especially dominates early 
novels like Oliver Twist; the hue which the common creed 
of the Dickens school imparted to their fiction is nowhere 
more clearly marked. Oliver, the parish boy, is really the 
illegitimate son of a gentleman of some wealth by a woman 
whose disgrace drove her to the almshouse where the lad 
was born. There he spends some childhood years, the 



THE SENSATIONAL IN MODERN ENGLISH FICTION 15 

wretchedness of his life aggravated by the parsimony and 
brutaUty of the management. Apprenticed to the under- 
taker, OHver finds his lot unimproved, and decides that any 
change must be for the better. He sets off for London. 
On the road he falls in with The Artful Dodger, one of a 
band of London thieves, who befriends him. Finding that 
Oliver has no destination in the city, the Dodger offers him 
a lodging with the gang whom Fagin directs. Owing to 
the precariousness of their trade, the thieves are always on 
the lookout for recruits; and a recruit, all unwittingly, 
Oliver becomes. As soon as he has been coached a little at 
pocket-picking, he is sent out upon the streets, where his 
inexpertness and ignorance cause him to be taken in his 
first offense. Rescued by Mr. Brownlow (who is really his 
grandfather), Oliver is shortly found by one of the band, 
and tricked into returning to Fagin. Next he is sent with 
Bill Sikes, the housebreaker, to crack a country crib, Oliver's 
part being to effect an entrance through a small window in 
order to admit his confederates. In the attempt Oliver is 
wounded by a gunshot. A second time the boy is rescued 
from the band. The first expedition in which he engaged 
resulted in his meeting his grandfather; the second brings 
him to an aunt. Meanwhile, however, Oliver's half-brother, 
who is withholding from him considerable property, dis- 
covers the lad's whereabouts, and contracts with Fagin to 
have him made into an unpardonable criminal. Once more 
the thieves kindap him. But one of them, Nancy, the 
mistress of Sikes, takes pity on him and communicates with 
Mr. Brownlow, whom she knows to be interested in the 
boy. But Nancy, having fallen under suspicion of the chief, 
is followed and her plan discovered. Fagin intrusts the 
vengeance of the band to Sikes, who swiftly and brutally 
kills the girl. Then retribution falls fast and heavily upon 
the gang. Sikes, in a last effort to escape, involuntarily 



16 ' DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

hangs himself in an effort to descend from a roof; Fagin is 
apprehended and goes insane in prison. 

This is fearful enough certainly, but conveys little notion 
of the particularity of horrors in the dramatic, sensational 
novel. Bill Sikes, for instance, is at considerable pains to 
make us aware what a terrible fellow he is. When Fagin is 
preparing him for the announcement of Nancy's perfidy, 
the master thief puts the case hypothetically, inquiring 
what Sikes would do if The Dodger had ''split." "Vd 
grind his skull under the iron heel of my boot into as many 
grains as there are hairs upon his head," Bill retorts. ''Sup- 
pose I did," Fagin inquires. ''If I was tried with you," says 
the ever-ready housebreaker, "I'd fall upon you with them 
(the manacles) in the open court, and beat your brains out 
afore the people." Sikes having made clear that his vengeance 
would be without respect of persons, Fagin acquaints him 
with the culprit's name, brandishing the while one hand in 
the air and wiping the foam from his mouth with the other. 
"Hell's fire," roars Sikes, "let me go," and off he rushes to 
his wretched mistress, whose face he pounds to a jelly with 
the butt of a revolver. This being insufficient, he finishes 
off the job by a blow with "a heavy club." 

A chapter or two further on we have the murderer at 
bay. Unable to keep out of London, he is betrayed in his 
usual haunts by the presence of his dog. The mob closes 
about the house where he hoped for concealment; Sikes, 
knowing the place to be well locked, throws up the window 
and dramatically defies his pursuers thus — ''Do your 
worst! I'll cheat you yet." Whereupon "of all the terrific 
yells that ever fell on mortal ears, none could exceed the 
cry of the infuriated throng." Sikes had planned to escape 
by letting himself down from the roof into a ditch which 
ran behind the house; but when he succeeds in getting upon 
the housetop he discovers that the tide has ebbed, leaving 



THE SENSATIONAL IN MODERN ENGLISH FICTION 17 

the ditch a sea of mud. Perceiving the intention and the 
impossibihty of its fulfillment, the crowd '^ raised a cry of 
triumphant execration to which all their previous shouting 
had been whispers." Still trusting to the chance of escaping 
by way of the ditch, Sikes fastens his rope to the chimney 
and intends to adjust the noose at the other end under his 
armpits. ''At that very moment the murderer, looking 
behind him on the roof, threw his arms over his head and 
uttered a yell of terror. 

'''The eyes again!' he cried in an unearthly screech. 
Staggering as if struck by lightning, he lost his balance and 
tumbled over the parapet. The noose was at his neck, it 
ran up with his weight, tight as a bow string, and swift as 
an arrow it spread. He fell for five and thirty feet. There 
was a sudden jerk, a terrific convulsion of the limbs, and 
there he hung with the open knife clenched in his stiffening 
hand. ... A dog which had lain contented till now ran back- 
wards and forwards on the parapet, wdth a dismal howl, and 
collecting himself for a spring, jumped for the dead man's 
shoulders. Missing his aim, he fell into the ditch, turning 
completely over as he went, and striking his head against 
a stone, dashed out his brains." 

This garishness is not the excrescence of immaturity, but 
a constant quality of Dickensian fiction. Quilp, in almost 
the next novel, would convince us that he too is a terrible 
fellow by eating eggs and shells together and by drinking 
boiling rum. Sikes's threat to beat out Fagin's brains with 
manacles Dickens makes good twice over in Great Expecta- 
tions. Bleak House, which offhand perhaps does not recur 
to the memory as particularly sensational, illustrates nine 
varieties of grotesque and violent death. Among them are 
the spontaneous combustion of Mr. Krook, the self-poison- 
ing of Lady Dedlock's former lover, insanity and malnutri- 
tion for one of the Chancery suitors, exposure and want for 



18 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

poor Jo, exposure and disgrace for Lady Dedlock, shooting 
for Mr. Tulkinghom, and hanging presumably for the 
French maid who murdered him. Again, in Great Expecta- 
tions, Dickens had a theme which was novel and sensational 
enough, one would think, without the elaboration of crude 
violence. The idea of a lad who befriends a convict, and 
who later is befriended in return by the convict's setting 
him up as a gentleman, certainly seems fertile and novel 
enough of itself. But Dickens was not of that opinion. He 
introduces a demented woman who had been deserted on 
her wedding day and had worn her bridal finery ever since. 
As a bit of gratuitous charnel-house horror the poor woman 
makes an end by burning to death in her faded wedding 
costume. Another character, Old Orlick, exists mainly to 
break a woman's skull with a chain, and narrowly to miss 
the opportunity of beating in Pip's with a hammer. But 
this is not all — the story of the first convict involves that 
of another whom the first has ample reason to hate. This 
hatred gives rise to more beating of heads with prisoner's 
manacles, and a final conflict which results for one rascal 
in drowning, for the other in fatal injuries. There are ad- 
ventures of this precious pair which are kept largely in the 
background, such as the betrayal of a woman, child murder, 
and a death-grapple in which one woman strangles another. 
This constant emphasis from Oliver Twist to Edwin Drood 
upon the most brutal stimulants of fear suggests that to a 
considerable extent Dickens valued narrative material as 
it provided opportunities for such effects as those described. 
Indeed all these horrors are consonant with avowed narrative 
principles. 

In addition to Dickens, the most distinguished adherents 
to these principles in Victorian times were Charles Reade 
and Wilkie Collins. Together they form a ''school" of 
literature in a sense unusual among the English. Reade, 



THE SENSATIONAL IN MODERN ENGLISH FICTION 19 

the elder of these disciples, was an Oxford man, having taken 
his Bachelor's degree at Magdalen College, where he also 
won a fellowship in 1835 at the early age of 21. The youngest 
of eleven children, Reade came of a substantial country 
family. His father was a squire of some property; his 
mother a remarkable woman from whom the novelist in- 
herited, apparently, much of the eccentricity which marked 
his life. He had thought of medicine for a profession, but, 
finding a weak stomach quite unequal to the dissecting room, 
had turned to the law. Finally he had taken a law degree, 
though the stage commanded his enthusiasm. It is signifi- 
cant that Reade approached fiction through the drama. His 
aspiration to win renown as a playwright was so persis- 
tent that he caused the word ''dramatist " to precede *' novel- 
ist" upon his tombstone. Finally becoming acquainted 
with Tom Taylor, who through the fifties had an enviable 
reputation among theatrical folk, Reade collaborated with 
him in the successful comedy Masks and Faces, 1852. The 
plot of this play Reade utilized for his first novel Peg Wof- 
fington. Rather oddly Reade seems to have been unskillful 
and diffuse in stage construction, for he became master of 
one of the most direct and swift narrative styles in English 
prose fiction. At all events Taylor early suggested that his 
literary capabilities were better fitted for novel- than for 
play-writing. When this advice was repeated by the actress 
Laura Seymour, to whom Reade offered his play Christie 
Johnstone, he took it seriously; and in the fifties, already more 
than thirty-five years old, he began the series of novels by 
which he is chiefly remembered. Until her death in 1879 
Mrs. Seymour remained his chief critic and adviser. His 
first stories. Peg Woffington and Christie Johnstone — though 
now, after The Cloister and the Hearth, probably the best 
known of his work — made no especial stir upon publica- 
tion. It was not until 1856, with the appearance of It is 



20 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

Never too Late to Mend, a story dealing with the Australian 
gold fields and reform in the prison system, that Reade 
caught the public. From that time to his death in 1884 
he was one of the most popular men of letters. After the 
death of Thackeray and of Dickens, he divided with George 
Eliot the reputation of being the greatest living novelist. 
After It is Never too Late to Mend came White Lies, 1857; 
Love me little, Love me long, 1859; The Cloister and the 
Hearth, 1861; Hard Cash, 1863; Griffith Gaunt, 1866; Foul 
Play, 1868; Put Yourself in his Place, 1870; A Terrible 
Temptation, 1871; The Wandering Heir, 1872; A Simple- 
ton, 1872; A Woman Hater, 1877; A Perilous Secret, 1883. 

William Wilkie Collins, who was named for two painters, 
— his father and Sir David Wilkie, — was ten years younger 
than Reade. While articled in the tea trade, the young 
man composed Antonina, a historical story, which so pleased 
his father that the elder Collins decided to put his son to 
the study of law. Wilkie's first published book was the bi- 
ography of his father, who died in 1847. He seems at this 
time to have been undecided whether painting or fiction was 
his vocation. Antonina, published in 1850 as an experiment, 
was tolerably well received. A year later he met Dickens, 
with whom he formed a life-long friendship. Dickens's 
favorable opinion of Basil in 1852 was probably a turning 
point in the younger man's life. Dickens, as the editor of 
a popular miscellany, found Collins clever and worth culti- 
vating. Collins turned definitively to letters, and became 
an aide in Household Words, which afforded him his chief 
outlet until 1860. The Woman in White, brought out in 
All the Year Round, to which Household Words had given 
way in the year 'fifty-nine, won him a reputation as the 
foremost plot constructor of the time. Thereafter his repu- 
tation was not confined to England. His stories were regu- 
larly translated into other languages, and Collins himself 



THE SENSATIONAL IN MODERN ENGLISH FICTION 21 

sometimes felt that his foreign audience was more apprecia- 
tive than the native. There is no doubt that he suffered 
more than Dickens and Reade from the reaction in favor 
of domestic stories. Always a serious, conscientious work- 
man, he had no great knack of character drawing. At the 
same time his sensationalism at its best is not facile, like 
Reade's, nor sentimental like Dickens's; but massive and 
intellectual. After Basil in 1852 his main novels were 
Hide and Seek, 1854; The Dead Secret, 1857; The Woman in 
White, 1860; No Name, 1862; Armadale, 1866; The Moon- 
stone, 1868; Man and Wife, 1870; Poor Miss Finch, 1872; 
The New Magdalen, 1873; The Law of the Lady, 1875; The 
Two Destinies, 1876; The Haunted Hotel, 1878; JezebeVs 
Daughter, 1880; The Black Robe, 1881; Heart and Science, 
1883; I say No, 1884. Another story. Blind Love, which was 
running serially when Collins became fatally ill in 1889, was 
completed by Sir Walter Besant. 

Hardly had Reade and Collins finally elected novel- 
writing as a profession, when a new variety of novel, with 
ideals sharply opposed to theirs, caught the fancy of the 
more serious part of the public. Down almost to mid-century 
romance had held popular preference in fiction. Just before 
1850, however, there comes a sturdy revolt against this 
novel of horrors and violent death in favor of representa- 
tions of life as it is. The quieter realistic story had not 
wanted the suffrage of critics from the time of Maria Edge- 
worth, nor, though it had been overshadowed by Scott and 
by Byron, had it wanted an audience. The critical bias 
in favor of realism appears in the contemporary reviews of 
Jane Austen and of Maturin. The Quarterly noticed Per- 
suasion and Northanger Abbey, and Melmoth the Wanderer 
in the same number. Miss Austen's tales had justice, but 
poor Maturin was damned out of hand for attempting to 
palm off stale romantic excitements. He is accused of 



22 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

ignorance, rant, and blasphemy by The Quarterly. The 
Edinburgh, with that assumption of finaUty which charac- 
terized the early journalistic reviewers, announced that it 
was high time for criticism to step forward and abate this 
nuisance of diabolical fiction. So much for a book that had 
the admiration of Scott, Balzac, Baudelaire, and Rossetti. 
It may be said that the opposition taste and practice began 
to take precedence with Thackeray's Vanity Fair. Bulwer, 
always susceptible to changes in the market, and Lever, 
who began in Harry Lorrequer and Charles O^M alley as the 
Scott of the Napoleonic wars, soon followed. More sub- 
stantial and partisan adherents than Bulwer and Lever took 
up the new cause in the persons of Anthony Trollope and 
George Eliot. 

The opposition of these groups was sharp, sometimes even 
to the point of bitterness. Thackeray said of Dickens's 
work; ''He knows that my books are a protest against his 
— that if one set are true, the other must be false." He 
complained in Catherine, of Oliver Twist, that Fagin's band 
are "sl most agreeable set of rascals indeed, who have their 
virtues too, but not good company for any man. We had 
better pass them by in decent silence; for as no writer can 
or dare tell the whole truth about them, there is no need to 
give ex parte statement of their virtue." In Chapter 5 of 
Amos Barton, George Eliot foresees objections to her prosy 
clergyman — "a man whose virtues were not heroic, and 
who had no undetected crimes within his breast; who had 
not the slightest mystery hanging about him, but was pal- 
pably and unmistakably commonplace." Mrs. Farthingale, 
"to whom tragedy means ermine tippets, adultery, and 
murder," will not like him. That being the fact, says the 
author, as conclusion of the whole matter, ''you will easily 
find reading more to your taste, since I learn from the 
newspapers that many remarkable novels full of striking 



THE SENSATIONAL IN MODERN ENGLISH FICTION 23 

situations, thrilling incidents and eloquent writing, have 
appeared only within the last season." Trollope, writing 
of fellow workmen in Chapter 13 of his autobiography, 
expresses as his opinion of Dickens: ''It has been the 
peculiarity and the marvel of this man's power that he 
invested his puppets with a charm that enabled him to dis- 
pense with human nature. There is a drollery about them, in 
my estimation, very much below the humour of Thackeray, 
but which has reached the intellect of all; while Thackeray's 
humour has escaped the intellect of many. Nor is the 
pathos of Dickens human. It is stagey and melodramatic. 
But it is so expressed that it touches every heart a little." 
A few pages later in the same chapter Trollope commends 
Wilkie Collins for excelling "all contemporaries in a certain 
most difficult branch of his art," construction; but adds, 
''such work," in which he is always conscious of the artifice, 
"gives me no pleasure." It is clear, then, that the realism 
which became ascendant with Vanity Fair was in a sense 
"high-brow" fiction. Having therefore the suffrage of the 
best reviews and of solid, conservative folk, it appears in 
contemporary records to be more popular than it really 
was. For example, Thackeray to a certain class seemed to 
beat Dickens "out of the world." Another representative 
lady, Charles Reade's mother, thought Dickens vulgar, 
though she was very fond of the heroines of G. P. R. James. 
Yet Thackeray himself supposed Dickens's instalment 
pamphlets of novels to have about four or five times as great 
a sale as his own. 

Clearly the millions read Great Expectations, The Woman 
in White, Lady Audley^s Secret, and Foul Play. The sensa- 
tional, melodramatic story from the very condition of the 
public represented necessarily the popular tendency during 
the third quarter of the century; and one has only casually 
to turn the pages of The Athenaeum during the sixties to 



24 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

learn that its vogue was tremendous and, to the critics, dis- 
quieting. So general had such stories become that the re- 
viewers invented a new name for them — sensation novels. 
This term was felt almost as a compound. Not the least 
disturbing characteristic about them, according to contem- 
porary opinion, was that many were perpetrated by women. 
M. E. Braddon, Mrs. Wood, Ouida, Mrs. Norton, and others 
now almost entirely forgotten made themselves only less 
obnoxious than Wilkie Collins. A few titles culled almost 
at random from the book reviews of The Athenaeum will 
suggest something as to the turn that popular novels had 
taken. Here we find notices of Forbidden Fruit, The Trail 
of the Serpent, Nobly False, Lady Audley's Secret (also the 
secret of Margaret, Flavia, and others). The Last Days of 
a Bachelor, The Law of Divorce, No Name, Such Things are, 
Held in Bondage, Clinton Maynard, A Tale of the World, 
The Flesh, and the Devil, Honor and Dishonor, The Inter- 
rupted Marriage, A Page from the Peerage, The Heiress and 
Her Lovers, Skating on Thin Ice. Punch, in May, 1862, 
published announcement of a Sensation Times, which was 
to devote itself 'Ho Harrowing the Mind, making the Flesh 
Creep, causing the Hair to stand on End, giving Shocks to 
the Nervous System, destroying the Conventional Moralities, 
and generally unfitting the PubUc for the Prosaic Avocations 
of Life." ''A novelist confined at Botany Bay, who expects 
shortly to obtain a ticket of leave, is to be editor." Reade 
and Boucicault's Foul Play, 1868, evoked a burlesque in 
Punch by Burnand entitled Chikken Hazard. The parody, 
was prefaced by notice of engagement of a new novel com- 
pany — '^The Sensational Novel Company" (Limited) for 
Punch, the chief writers of which are the authors of — 



THE SENSATIONAL IN MODERN ENGLISH FICTION 25 

(A) 1. Never too Late for the Colleen Pogue (Reade and 

Dion Boucicault). 

2. Dora's Vampire (allusion to Reade's play on Tenny- 

son's poem). 

3. Who's Griffith's (Gaunt) ? (Reade's novel). 

4. Hard Streets of London Assurance (Reade's Hard 

Cash and Boucicault's play London Assurance). 

5. Peg Woffington's Long Strike (Reade's novel Peg 

Woffington) . 

6. The Double Carriage (Reade's play and novel, The 

Double Marriage, taken from the French). 

7. Hunted Up (Dickens's Hunted Down). 

(B) 1. The Woman with No Name (Collins's No Name 

and The Woman in White). 

2. The Thoroughfare without a Heart (Dickens's and 

Collins's No Thoroughfare). 

3. The 'idden 'and (Wilkie Collins's story, The Hidden 

Hand) . 

(C) L Lady Disorderly's Secret (Mrs. Maxwell's Lady 

Audley^s Secret). 

Punch further explains that ''The editor's object has been 
to obtain the most startling, most thrilling, most exciting 
plot constructed by the most original romancers — whether 
from their own or foreign brains matters not — now in the 
country. The readers' time will not be wasted on pages of 
analysis of character, descriptive touches about sunsets, 
sunrises, trees, and the appearance of nature, which only 
impede the clear course of the story and tire the patience of 
the purchaser." Sensation writing drew attention from 
higher dignitaries than Mr. Punch, however; upon it the 
great reviews, like The Quarterly and The Contemporary, 
trained their heavy artillery. The Quarterly traced it 
to cheap magazines, railway bookstalls, and circulating 



26 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

libraries; The Contemporary, to a widespread corruption 
in society. 

The sensation novel had no accepted definition or model. 
Nevertheless, some current attempts at explanation will 
facilitate a better understanding of the phenomenon. A 
writer in The Christian Remembrancer declares that ''The 
one indispensable point in a sensational novel is that it 
should contain something abnormal and unnatural; some- 
thing that induces in the simple idea a sort of thrill." Pro- 
ceeding, then, to the heroines of Mrs. Maxwell and Mrs. 
Wood, he finds the objection to their stories in ''the utter 
imrestraint" in which these women are permitted "to ex- 
patiate and develop their stormy, impulsive, passionate 
characters." "The heroines are charming because they are 
imdisciplined." "This drop from the empire of reason" 
means "a consistent appeal to the animal part of our nature, 
and avows a preference for its manifestations, as though 
power and intensity came through it." The Quarterly in 
1863 printed a review of twenty-four sensation novels, 
including among others of less note Lady Audley^s Secret^ 
Wilkie Collins's No Name, and Mrs. Wood's Danebury 
House. A sensation novel, as The Quarterly reviewer under- 
stands it, "as a matter of course abounds in incident. In- 
deed as a general rule it consists of nothing else — action ! 
action! action! is the first thing needed, the second and the 
third. The human actors of the piece are, for the most 
part, but so many lay figures on which to exhibit a drapery 
of incident. Allowing for the necessary division of all 
characters of a tale into male and female, old and young, 
virtuous and vicious, there is hardly anything said or done 
by any one specimen of a class which might not with equal 
fitness be said or done by any other specimen of the same 
class. Every game is played with the same pieces, differing 
only in the moves." The critic distinguishes three charac- 



THE SENSATIONAL IN MODERN ENGLISH FICTION 27 

teristics in his specimens — proximity, personality, predilec- 
tion to stories of crime. They are invariably stories of the 
day, he observes, because proximity makes the sensation 
more intense. ''It is necessary to be near a mine in order 
to be blown up by the explosion." Moreover, ''if a scandal 
of more than usual piquancy occurs in high life, or a crime 
of extraordinary horror figures among our causes celehreSf 
the sensationalist is immediately at hand to weave the inci- 
dent into a thrilling tale with names and circumstances 
slightly disguised, so as at once to exercise the ingenuity of 
the reader in guessing the riddle." Finally, bigamy, which 
is a motive in eight of the twenty-four stories under considera- 
tion, adultery, and murder are favorite themes. 

The causes for this epidemic as seen by contemporaries 
were many. In The Quarterly article just cited the periodicals, 
circulating libraries, and railway bookstalls are held chiefly 
accountable. Sensation fiction is a commercial product 
fitted to a commercial demand; it supplies the demand by 
appealing to the nerves instead of the imagination. But such 
explanation does not enable us to get on. Why did circu- 
lating libraries and bookstalls flourish? In the November 
Contemporary for 1873, Vincent Murray concluded a notice 
of Ouida's Held in Bondage, Tricotrin, Strathmore, and 
Chandos in much more lugubrious vein. " Precisely as certain 
diseased conditions of the body give rise to a craving for un- 
natural food, so do certain morbid conditions of mind produce 
an appetite for literary food which a sound mental organiza- 
tion would reject. Individual instances of such morbid 
affections are fit subjects of study for the physician only, 
and the fact that a silly and ignorant woman should write 
novels which are at once vulgar, nasty, and immoral in 
tendency could not in itself be a matter of interest to readers 
of The Contemporary Review. But that such books have 
a very large and increasing circulation should be a matter 



28 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

of painful interest to every decent man and woman in 
England. These books are issued by one of the first 
houses in the trade; they are written for and read by 
society." All of which high seriousness seems curiously 
misinformed. 

We may come nearer a satisfactory understanding of 
sensationalism by other means. It was generally under- 
stood that Wilkie Collins's Woman in White, which ran 
through seven editions in six months, gave a new impetus 
to tales of mystery. By acute critics Collins was under- 
stood to be the counterpart of Mrs. Rad cliff e brought down 
to date. By virtue of his intellectual power, however, Collins 
was conceded to be something more than a mere sensation- 
alist; as The Nation said, he required the same sort of effort 
that Froude or Motley demands. The vogue of sensation 
fiction was understood as beginning with Mrs. Maxwell's 
imitation of The Woman in White, the famous Lady Audley's 
Secret, which followed two years later. A significant fact 
which has apparently largely escaped attention is that 
Mrs. Maxwell's story was dedicated to Bulwer-Lytton, 
^'in grateful acknowledgment of literary advice generously 
given." Moreover, Lord Lytton wrote Ouida an eight-page 
letter of congratulation upon one of her stories of high life. 
These circumstances, taken in connection with another, 
that the sensation novel almost invariably dealt with persons 
of station and wealth, suggest that if its mystery and melo- 
drama derived something from Collins, it also harked back 
to the ''fashionable novel" that Bulwer had begun in the 
twenties with Pelham. There can be little doubt that the 
mass of stories which occupied the book reviewers from early 
in the sixties for about a decade was little enough creditable 
to both its parents. Lady Audley^s Secret, as a story still 
reprinted in cheap libraries, may serve as an example of the 
most durable, perhaps, of the lot. 



THE SENSATIONAL IN MODERN ENGLISH FICTION 29 

Lucy Graham is a beautiful light-haired, blue-eyed 
governess in the family of the village surgeon when first 
rich old Sir Michael Audley finds her. Rather unconvinc- 
ingly, this excellent and wealthy man, who has never been 
in love, is passionately enamored of the pretty nobody and 
marries her. Lady Audley is not so innocent as she looks; 
previously she has wedded George Talboys, a dragoon, who, 
after spending his all upon her, has gone off to Australia to 
make a fortune. After three years of absence he is coming 
back with £20,000. At the time of Talboys' s arrival in 
England, Lady Audley has been a bigamist only a few 
weeks. When George looks her up, she contrives by means 
of a trap to drop him into an old well and quite absurdly 
supposes him dead. He disappears mysteriously. Robert 
Audley, nephew to Sir Michael, and friend to George, sets 
about untangling the strange disappearance, and finally 
discovers Lady Audley 's secret. That resolute lady desper- 
ately tries to burn him in an old inn where he is lodging. Next 
day, while Lady Audley is expecting tidings of his death, 
Robert confronts her with his proof before his uncle and 
discredits the doll-haired fiend. She is pronounced not 
quite sane and confined to a madhouse in Belgium, where 
she dies. The inferiority of this to The Woman in White 
and The Moonstone is especially apparent in two respects. 
Lady Audley is a crude amateur in crime, who attempts two 
very desperate murders with the incompetence of a school 
girl. She drops her first husband into the well and stays 
not to see if her business is done. She equally trusts to 
blind chance in the attempt on Robert Audley. In The 
Moonstone and in JezeheVs Daughter these things are looked 
after in a much more workmanlike way. Again, Mrs. Max- 
well had little of the knack of melodramatic climax which 
makes the tense moments of The Moonstone or of Man and 
Wife memorable. No other test exhibits so plainly the 



30 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

unique genius of Collins as comparison with the best contem- 
poraries who followed his path. 

The themes of Lady Audley's Secret — bigamy, attempted 
murder, arson, and insanity — are stock themes, as The 
Quarterly reviewer indicated. There is, however, another 
trait of the book hardly less significant. This is a certain 
luxuriousness and lusciousness in description. Lady Audley's 
yellow hair, the richness of her dress, and the fittings of her 
boudoir are reiterated into distinctness. Relatively at least 
Mrs. Maxwell did not make these sketches offensive. But 
many of those who followed her did. Indeed this voluptuous- 
ness of description — partly a matter of prurience, partly 
desire to picture wealth and luxury to those who could 
know it only through the medium of fiction — is a character- 
istic of sensation novels second only to the predilection to 
crime. It finds one of its most egregious exemplifications 
in Ouida. 

Louise Rame, daughter of a French teacher, showed her 
bent of mind early by enlarging her name to De la Ramee. 
Ouida, the signature to some forty novels between 1863 
and her death, was a childish mispronunciation of Louise. 
She began her literary career as a contributor to The New 
Monthly Magazine under Harrison Ainsworth, who seems to 
have been fittingly a kind of godfather in letters to her. 
Held in Bondage, her first novel, appeared in 1863. Her 
manner of writing, it is said, never altered greatly, so that 
she outlived her popularity completely. For whatever the 
faults of public and of ''commercial" novelists nowadays, the 
pretentious commonplace, the shoddy cynicism, and tinsel 
vulgarity on which Ouida built cannot any longer be mixed 
quite in her fashion. Strathmore, one of her earlier novels, 
is a typical sensation stoiy illustrating the customary por- 
trayal of ''high life" by those who never saw it for those 
who never came into it except by the back stairs. 



THE SENSATIONAL IN MODERN ENGLISH FICTION 31 

Strathmore, a descendant of the Normans, with a family 
motto ''Slay and Spare not," is impervious to love and 
desirous only of attaining fame as statesman and diplomat. 
He is obviously close kin to Bulwer's Devereux and Mal- 
travers. Strathmore falls in with ''the Vavasour," as Ouida 
likes to call her, — a reigning beauty whose origin is not 
known despite her being supposedly the wife of the Marquis 
of Vavasour and Vaux. Out of pure coquetry she makes a 
conquest of Strathmore, and they become lovers. This man, 
whose face reveals "power strangely blended with passion, 
repose with recklessness," and whose appearance within 
three pages is likened to that of Velasquez's political conspira- 
tors, Van Dyke's cavaliers, Charles Stuart, Catiline, and 
Strafford, becomes her slave. She persuades him to challenge 
his staunch friend Erroll, whom she has unsuccessfully 
wooed. Strathmore shoots Erroll dead; then, learning 
immediately of his mistress's perfidy, he casts her off, vowing 
revenge. He discovers the secret which the supposed Mar- 
quise has concealed — that she is not the wife but the 
mistress. He effects her ostracism from society. As repara- 
tion to Erroll he adopts his friend's daughter, Lucille, with 
whom as a middle-aged man he falls in love. Despite the 
protests of those who know how her father died, Strathmore 
weds the girl. "The Vavasour," who has been brought low, 
follows them to gain vengeance in her turn; but finally, 
having made Strathmore "suffer," she foregoes her revenge, 
realizing that it must fall mainly upon innocent Lucille. 
And so Strathmore lives happily ever after in the affection of 
the young wife whose father he murdered for a harlot. 

So bald a summary indicates the background of society, 
the basis of the tale in adultery, the purely story-book 
characters of the persons involved, and the paltry penalty 
for murder; it does not indicate the ineffable silliness, osten- 
tation, and vulgarity of the manner. A description of the 



32 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

heroine returned from a ball follows. "No toilette was so 
becoming as the azure neglige of softest Indian texture, with 
its profusion of gossamer lace about the arms and bosom, 
that she wore; no chaussure more bewitching than the slip- 
per fantastically broidered with gold and pearls into which 
the foot she held out to the fire to warm was slipped; no 
sanctuary for that belle des belles fitter and more enticing 
than the dressing room, with its rose tendre hangings, its 
silver swinging lamps, its toilette-table shrouded in lace, its 
mirrors framed in Dresden, its jasper tazze filled with jewels, 
its gemmed vases full of flowers, its crystal carafes of per- 
fumes and bouquets, its thousand things of luxury and 
grace. Here, perhaps, Marion, Lady Vavasour, looked her 
loveliest of all; and here she sat now, thinking, while the 
firelight shone on the dazzling whiteness of her skin, in the 
luminous depths of her eyes, and the shining unbound tresses 
of her hair, and on the diamond-studded circlet on her fair 
left hand that was the badge of her allegiance to one lord, 
and the signet of her title to reign, a Queen of Society, 
and a Marchioness of Vavasour and Vaux." 

Ouida's men fit this atmosphere perfectly. Erroll is 
represented as wTapping about him ''his seed-pearl em- 
broidered and sable-lined dressing gown, dainty and lovely 
enough for Lady Millicent to wear." Strathmore reflects 
thus, ''while perfuming his beard," about some of his women 
guests: "Pretty precisians, naughty as Messalina, who go 
to church hke Marguerite to meditate on Faust." He and 
his companions are Don Juans one and all, who are bored 
by endless perfumed notes on tinted paper from ladies. It 
is the glory apparently of the Strathmores that they "had 
never loved the women who had slept innocently on their 
hearts or laid out their pure lives within their keeping. The 
only passion that had ever roused them had been some 
fierce forbidden desire." The hero's friends agree that 



THE SENSATIONAL IN MODERN ENGLISH FICTION 33 

"everything virtuous is dull/' and so amuse themselves 
largely by talking the nastiest scandal about the women they 
know in euphemistic vein. Strathmore upon hearing of 
Lady Vavasour's infidelities to her husband intimates that 
dishonor is a nobleman's general reward for bestowing his 
name and wealth upon a beautiful woman. ''Dishonor? 
Fie, Strathmore," cried the Earl of Lechmere, a good- 
natured fellow in the Coldstreams, ''nobody uses those 
coarse, ugly dictionary words nowadays, except when he 
wants to get up a duel." Yet underneath this profusion of 
perfumes, jewels, ''manillas" and cheap cynicism, we are 
supposed to beHeve that they are terrible fellows. Strath- 
more, as befits his ''race," a favorite word with Ouida, "has 
something dangerous in his face." When he halts Lady 
Vavasour's runaway pair, he displays the dangerous passion 
that is in him by beating the horses he has stopped with 
the spirit and muscle of a horse-trainer. And he makes 
quite an exhibition of doing so, too, by first ostentatiously 
borrowing the whip from the helpless driver, and then, 
after he has thrashed the animals soundly, by carelessly 
and indifferently, as if he were bowing to an acquaintance 
on the Ride, lifting his hat to the woman he has rescued. 
She in turn stretches out to him "two delicate, ungloved, 
jeweled hands." He is deadly with a gun, also, and can hit 
the ruby in a lady's ring at a hundred yards. One character 
most solemnly assures another that he saw Strathmore 
perform the feat at St. Petersburg. 

The essential explanation of all this is simple. James 
de la Pluche, often in petticoats, has found the market for 
"fashionable fax." Mudie's, Cawthorn & Hutts', or The 
Library Company furnished for a guinea a year more of 
Ouida and her like than one could read. London, about the 
time she began, was the home of about two hundred and 
twenty periodicals — some of them, like Dickens's, to be 



34 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

had for twopence. Already cheap editions of the novelists 
at from one to six shillings the volume were customary. 
Historically sensationalism clearly represents a popular 
development in fiction in which the novel of mystery is 
crossed with that of fashionable life. The appeal to fear and 
the delineation of society in a peculiarly ignorant and vulgar 
fashion were inherent in conditions, because the appeal to 
fear is even a more nearly universal appeal than that of 
love between the sexes, and because none are so curious 
about Lady Audley and her boudoir or Strathmore and his 
perfumed beard as the bourgeois. The public of the sixties 
cared little for the castle in the Apennines. The adapting 
of its melodramatic terrors to local conditions and scenes, 
however, involved diiSiculties. The summary vengeance 
dealt out with the sword by a Byronic hero becomes stealthy 
murder, and the violence to her person always threatening 
Mrs. Radcliffe's heroine becomes adultery. The themes are 
the same; but the portrayal in a community where police 
decently enforce the civil law made difficult the task of the 
sensationaUst. 

There is something ludicrous in the seriousness with which 
current criticism viewed the orgy of sensation writing. 
This seriousness is comprehensible only when one bears in 
mind the smugness and sanctimoniousness of the Victorian 
middle-class public. To argue, as The Contemporary did, 
that Ouida, for instance, indicated any unusual corruption 
of society was to fly in the face of fact. Literary disease, 
sensation fiction, as it was written by Ouida and her like, 
certainly was — but it was a disease as inevitable as croup 
and measles are to children. It exhibits a replica of the 
conditions in the theater after Macready's retirement. 
Roughly, what Reade's melodrama and Burnand's burlesques 
were to Robertson and Gilbert, these sensation novels were 
to Walter Besant's, Blackmore's, and William Black's. 



THE SENSATIONAL IN MODERN ENGLISH FICTION 35 

They were not superseded by George Eliot's stories, nor 
Meredith's, nor Hardy's. Descendants of Mrs. Maxwell 
and Ouida, like Laura Jean Libby, may still be found at 
the corner of the railway bookstall, but they are certainly 
not read by the class corresponding to the readers of Strath- 
more or of The Interrupted Marriage. A couple of decades 
later than the appearance of Strathmore, Blackmore, Bu- 
chanan, Besant, and William Black had taught the public 
better. 

In the early efforts of these writers, indeed, the waning 
sensational tendency is apparent. William Black, for in- 
stance, began as a novelist with Love or Marriage,^ a 
book he was accustomed later to speak of as "happily out 
of print." Blackmore's Clara Vaughan was regarded as an 
unequal sensation story, lighted up by attractive descrip- 
tions of scenery. Lorna Doone in 1869 and A Daughter of 
Heth in 1871 were extraordinarily popular, as were Besant 
and Rice's Ready Money Mortihoy and The Golden Butterfly 
in the early seventies. In such narratives as these the rigors 
and violence of the old sensationalism are giving way to 
sentiment. With the coming of these novelists sensation 
fiction in the Victorian sense seems to have slid down the 
scale to find a resting place in yellow backs. Penny JupiterSy 
and "family story papers" of blessed memory. The demand 
it answered is a perennial demand in modern society; a 
hundred years ago Byron and his followers were its exponents; 
half a century ago Dickens, Reade, and Collins devoted 
undoubted genius to it; to-day moving pictures are feeding 
the same demand on a scale and with an energy of which 
only the twentieth century is capable. It is obviously 
erroneous, however, to imply that it no longer gets printed. 
Until education and literary sophistication are far different 
from those democracy has hitherto produced, the phenomenal 
^ Richard Garnett's notice of Black in N. D. of B. 



36 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

sellers will in most cases be of the sensational type. James 
Payn's Lost Sir Massingberd, which in 1864 is said to have 
increased the circulation of Chambers' Journal by 20,000 
copies, Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, Hornung's 
Raffles, Katherine Thurston's The Masquerader, exhibit the 
appeal as still undiminished in letters. 

At the top of the sensation scale two generations ago stood 
the Dickensians, the men of genius whom the lesser folk 
imitated. With them the sensational, as has been said^ 
was a definite creed of art. Understanding of this creed 
depends chiefly upon a knowledge of the market and the 
literary conditions under which they worked ; their professed 
opinions of and preferences in narrative art; and the history 
of the method which grew up in prose fiction about the so- 
called Byronic hero. 



CHAPTER II 

Foreword 
THE BACKGROUND OF SENSATIONALISM 

The narrative methods of Dickens and his followers were 
determined to an unusual extent by matters involved in the 
extraordinary extension of the reading public that preceded 
and accompanied their generation. They were all professedly 
popular in aim, speaking for and to the class which the reform 
of 1832 had made a power in society. Dickens pointedly 
avowed such an object in the foreword to his first periodical. 
Reade, in revulsion from the labors of The Cloister and the 
Hearth, exclaimed: ^'I write for the public, and the public 
cares less for a dead lion than for a living ass." Doubtless 
this explains why he never again attempted historical 
romance upon the scale of his great medieval novel. Collins 
protests that a story of his will never obtain fair hearing 
until it comes to the popular edition — that is, until it is 
no longer listed exclusively as a three-volume novel at a 
guinea and a half. Their sensationalism was in part a result 
of the conditions under which they worked, as well as a 
cause for the extension of sensational fiction. Something 
like general recognition of these facts before 1870 is clearly 
indicated by Punch's parody titles for works of '' The Sensa- 
tional Novel Company." In the second quarter of the cen- 
tury trade in printed matter was revolutionized; cheap 
miscellanies and books became realities ; a new race of pub- 
lishers unlike the Murrays and Constables was springing up ; 
popular writers were struggling with them for a fair share 
of greater profits than literature had ever before yielded. 

37 



38 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

Some of these changes especially significant in the history 
of Victorian sensation novels were the rise of cheap books, 
the struggle especially of the novelists for a fair remunera- 
tion, the influence of miscellany and serial publication upon 
narrative form, and the attitude toward each other of novelist 
and public. 

3. The Rise of Cheap Books 

Behind the epoch of sensationalism which the school 
of Dickens dominated lies a long and complex chapter of 
trade revolution in bookmaking, in which Dickens's shilling 
pamphlet novels and cheap miscellanies played a leading 
part. Victorian sensationalism, which may briefly be de- 
fined as romance for the populace, could not really enjoy 
its innings until the machinery for disseminating cheap 
books had been rather highly developed. This cheapening 
of the product and multiplication of the agencies were the 
main trade phenomena from 1825 onward for about forty 
years. Specifically trade conditions reveal an almost unno- 
ticed but compelling reason for the great length of the 
Victorian novel, especially that of the domestic type, -and 
enable an understanding of the pronounced antipathy to 
that kind of story expressed by Reade and Collins. The 
main influences for lower prices during these forty years 
were three: the shilling pamphlet novel, which reduced the 
current price of a full-length novel by one third; the circu- 
lating libraries, which, handling high-priced first editions 
by the hundreds, demanded discounts for buying in quanti- 
ties; and the miscellanies, which, substantially relieved by 
a lighter paper tax, made novels by Dickens, Bulwer, Lever, 
and others of equal note available for six or seven shillings 
before the story was printed in book form. 

It is not generally known that, as the demand for Waverley 
and its companion tales grew, Scott and his business asso- 
ciates imposed high and higher prices for his novels until 



THE BACKGROUND OF SENSATIONALISM 39 

the appearance of Kenilworth in 1821. The ponderous vol- 
umes which Constable issued, with their meadows of margin, 
had little in common with pocket editions and handbooks 
which enterprising publishers print in the twentieth century. 
Constable's and Murray's books were expensive products 
for the leisured and wealthy. Before Scott novels were 
hardly deemed worthy the costly permanent dress which 
such printers provided. Sir Walter was no less a gracefully 
negligent delineator of gallant heroes and heroines in distress 
than a shrewd man of business; and when Waverley proved 
capital both as romance and as business, he was diligent 
enough in attending to the business. Waverley, in 1814, 
sold for a guinea, a price attached to no other story of that 
3^ear except Lady Morgan's O^Donnell. The Antiquary, two 
years later, was marked up to twenty-four shillings ; Ivanhoe, 
in 1820, to thirty; Kenilworth in 1821, to thirty-one shillings 
sixpence. This final figure is important, inasmuch as for 
nearly half a century it remained the standard price for a 
first edition of almost any novelist who could achieve three 
volumes not too bad to print, and was finally crowded out 
of the market by cheaper forms only after about seventy 
years. Thus, an anomaly of printing, the three-decker at 
a guinea and a half, remained through the period of cheapen- 
ing, a rather malign influence upon the structure of the 
Victorian novel, especially upon that mid-century favorite, 
the domestic story. 

But in the same decade that this outrageous price was 
foisted upon book buyers, the demand for inexpensive read- 
ing matter of the superior sort was finding concrete expres- 
sions in such projects as Constahle^s Miscellany, and at the 
beginning of the next, in the various sheet publications of 
The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. 1825 
saw the beginning of both these activities. In that year 
Brougham's pamphlet, Observations on the Education of the 



40 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

People, ran through twenty editions. In the following year 
was effected the organization of The Society, with Brougham 
as president. At the same time Constable in Edinburgh 
was contemplating pamphlet publication of standard books 
which were to be brought out in weekly parts, three parts 
at a shilling each to constitute an entire work. "Printing 
and bookselling," he remarked in prophetic words, "as 
instruments for enlightening and entertaining humanity, 
and of course for making money, are as yet in their mere 
infancy." His pamphlets, he believed, would sell a million 
copies the issue. "Twelve volumes in a year, a half penny 
profit upon every copy which will make me richer than the 
possession of all the copyrights of all the quartos that ever 
were or will be hot pressed; twelve volumes so good that 
millions must wish to have them, and so cheap that every 
butcher's callant may have them if he pleases to let me tax 
him a sixpence a week." Despite the Edinburgh circle's 
evident amusement at Constable's sanguine ardor, the book- 
seller enlisted the support of Scott, Lockhart, and Maria 
Edge worth, and received approbation of Sydney Smith. 
Knowing the number trade to be carried on extensively 
about London, he had communicated with his southern 
agents, not only explaining the plan, but requesting such 
information as they could furnish about the new branch of 
bookselling which he planned entering upon. The first 
number appeared January 6, 1827. On the 20th of the 
month he wrote to Scott that the miscellany "had met 
with a very considerable success." Indeed praise of the 
plan had been so general and so generous as to warrant 
greater hopes than the depressed state of trade led him to 
expect. Already he had rivals. But Constable had been 
so long delayed in realizing his pet scheme that he was 
never to ascertain how much of the glory and profit which 
he expected it really offered. The common ruin that in- 



THE BACKGROUND OF SENSATIONALISM 41 

volved him and Sir Walter Scott was upon them. In July, 
1827, the bookseller died, his end having been hastened by 
the trade calamity of that year. The Miscellany is less 
significant perhaps than Constable's prophetic vision of its 
possibiUties. 

Meanwhile, Brougham's society had been actively prose- 
cuting its campaign. Colburn, Murray, and Knight had 
considered publishing for it; the organizers had restricted 
its objects, not without protest, strictly to that which its 
title implies. Conservative opinion generally deprecated 
the popular training which did not make religious instruc- 
tion a prime consideration; but the leaders of the society 
itself resolved that neither religious nor political teaching 
came within their scope. The Penny Magazine, begun in 
1832, had a circulation of 200,000 copies before the year 
was out. So great was its success that the society planned 
a more ambitious Penny Encyclopedia, the articles for which 
were to be original contributions by the best experts in the 
realm. Ultimately eight volumes were to have been issued 
in penny numbers. When the sales rose to 75,000 copies, 
the society seemed likely to duplicate the success of the 
magazine; but poor planning, which made necessary the 
doubling of the price and of issues twice within three years, 
cut down the subscriptions to 20,000. Finally the encyclo- 
pedia was abandoned. 

By the reform year, or a Uttle later, there was not only 
an extensive trade in cheap periodical publications, but it 
was also forcing its way up the scale toward eminent re- 
spectability. How keenly Constable, as well as Brougham 
and his associates, had foreseen new conditions may be in- 
ferred from the computation of Knight, the society's pub- 
lisher. In 1846 he declares: '' Fourteen penny and half 
penny magazines, twelve economic and social journals, and 
thirty-seven weekly sheets forming separate books were to 



42 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

be found in the shops of many regular booksellers and on the 
counters of all small dealers in periodicals that had sprung 
up through the country. The cheapness was accomplished 
in some by pilfering every copyright work that came in 
their way. There were very few of these publications whose 
writers were paid for original articles upon a scale as liberal 
as that of the best reviews and magazines." The figures 
amply indicate the popularity of the society's methods; 
and the connection of eminent scholars such as contributed 
to the Penny Encyclopedia gave to cheap pamphlets designed 
for the populace a new standing in general esteem; so that 
the number trade, which Constable in 1825 found in the 
hands of inferior dealers, had lost nothing in cheapness, but 
had gained in extent and in caste. 

The immediate ancestors of Pickwick and the pamphlet 
novel, however, were not Constable^s Miscellany or the 
Encyclopedia and Biographical Dictionary of The Society for 
the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Constable, who was 
known to his familiars in the trade as the Czar of Muscovy, 
had a high and mighty way of speaking. Some of the 
dealers in number books whom he condescendingly dismisses 
as inferior traders were not inconsiderable men; there were 
notably Thomas Kelly, who was made Lord Mayor of Lon- 
don just before the accession of Victoria, after a highly suc- 
cessful career as a dealer in such works as Kelly's Family 
Bible, The Pilgrim's Progress, and Foxe's Book of Martyrs; 
and George Virtue, well known from about 1820 as a pur- 
veyor of religious publications. Virtue was one of those 
interested in Pierce Egan's famous Life in London or The 
Adventures of Tom and Jerry, which was illustrated by the 
two Cruikshanks. Tom and Jerry, appearing in shilling 
pamphlets in 1821, took the town by storm. In a stage 
version it was played simultaneously in ten theaters. The 
author himself declared that sixty-five different publications 



THE BACKGROUND OF SENSATIONALISM 43 

had been derived from his sketches. The occasional popu- 
larity of this sort of thing in the twenties is not less worth 
noting than another fact. Thackeray, writing of George 
Cruikshank after the illustrator's death, makes some re- 
marks, based upon recollection it is true, of Egan's text: 
**As to the literary contents of the book they have passed 
sheer away. It was, most likely, not refined ; nay, the chances 
are that it was absolutely vulgar. But it must have had some 
merit of its own, that is clear, for all London read it and 
went to see it in dramatic shape." Little flattering as 
Thackeray's recollection is, it reflects perhaps the esteem 
in which the man of letters was wont to regard an ephemeral 
''number book." Egan's pamphlet form of Tom and Jerry 
was the direct predecessor of Pickwick. Pickwick, and the 
tales of Dickens generally, represent the apotheosis of the 
number trade. 

The story of the publication of this first great book of 
Dickens is well known; but some aspects of the price and 
publication in reference to commerce in fiction have received 
little or no attention. In 1836 Chapman & Hall, then a 
young firm, desiring letter-press to accompany a series of 
sporting prints by Cruikshank, were casting about for a 
facile, clever writer to supply it. Not Dickens, but another, 
then a popular and highly regarded young author, was their 
first choice. Charles Whitehead, whose Autobiography of 
Jack Ketch in 1834 had been extremely popular, was first 
offered the work. Whitehead, however, doubted his ability 
to turn off creditable copy by contract, and recommended 
his friend Dickens as having the requisite facility. Dickens 
was then a reporter, about twenty-five years of age, earning 
five guineas a week, and as yet known only as the author 
of a volume of clever sketches. Inasmuch as he was plan- 
ning to be married, the £15 offered for each monthly instal- 
ment was too tempting to be refused. The suicide of the 



44 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

illustrator before the second monthly part appeared left 
Dickens clearly master of the situation. The Posthumous 
Papers of the Pickwick Club created no immediate sensa- 
tion, but by the time the fifteenth number appeared were 
selling to the extent of 40,000 copies. By that time it was 
apparent that there had been no such sensation in letters 
since the early Scotch novels. Chapman & Hall, as the 
form of publication indicates, had aimed distinctly at the 
popular trade, and had luckily stumbled upon the writer 
who could appeal most powerfullj^ to the entire reading 
public — the writer who was to be teacher, spokesman, and 
entertainer of the new democratic audience. 

It has not been generally remarked that the shilUng 
pamphlet novel was an important step in bringing down the 
price of novels to the consumer. In 1840 cheap reissues of 
popular stories were still twelve or fifteen years in the future; 
Scott's price was still in its heyday. A tale by Dickens or 
Thackeray would be issued in from eight to twenty monthly 
parts, at a total cost of not more than twenty shillings, or 
only two thirds as much as that of the standard three- 
volume story. The influence of the pamphlet novel upon 
prices did not pass unnoticed at the time. The reviewer of 
Pendennis in Eraser^ s in January, 1851, wrote: "Along with 
other things equally hallowed by prescriptive usage, the 
three-volume novel is clearly going out with the tide, being 
superseded by the periodical novel, a cheaper article. Pick- 
wick is twice the length of Pelham and costs only two thirds 
as much. Long before free trade was dreamed of John 
Bull's constant impulse was to buy in the cheapest market. 
Even in case of that most superfluous of luxuries, fiction, he 
likes to get as much as he can for his money. Besides, it 
is so convenient to pay one's cash as it comes — in driblets." 
Clearly, then, the periodical pamphlet form of Dickens's 
stories and of Thackeray's tend automatically to prevent 



THE BACKGROUND OF SENSATIONALISM 45 

their entering the 31s. Qd. class on the very simple principle 
that goods offered for twenty shillings cannot well subse- 
quently be made to bring dls. 6c?. ^ Of Dickens's books 
only one, an edition of Great Expectations, which was origi- 
nally a serial in All the Year Round, is so listed in the Samp- 
son Low Catalogue of 1864. The Sketches by Boz, Pickwick, 
Martin Chuzzlewit, Bleak House, Domhey & Son, and David 
Copperfield in volume form are listed at twenty-one shillings. 
Vanity Fair brought the same amount. Pendennis and The 
Virginians, each in two volumes, brought twenty-six shil- 
lings. Twenty-one shillings or twenty-six, as the case may 
be, represents the original pamphlet price plus a charge for 
binding; but it is worth noting that the lower cost of the 
book is achieved without lowering the standard trade price 
of ten shillings sixpence for a volume of popular fiction. 

The pamphlet novel served only a temporary need, and 
consequently ran only a brief, though brilliant, course. 
Dickens's public demanded that he follow the method of 
publication adopted in his first great book, and made it 
highly profitable for him to do so. All his novels, with the 
exception of those utilized for serials ^ in miscellanies, 
appeared first in that form. Thackeray, when he felt that 
the time had come for an effort to lift himself out of hack 
periodical work, followed the precedent of Boz by bringing 
out all his five great novels except Esmond in shilhng pam- 
phlets; but, appealing to a narrower audience than his rival, 

^ It should be noted that the tendency was by no means uniform. 
A good many, perhaps the majority of, novels published in cheap 
miscellanies through the sixties were subsequently issued in three 
volumes at the guinea and a half rate. See end of the present chapter. 

2 Oliver Tivist appeared in Bentley's Miscellany; The Old Curiosity 
Shop and Barnahy Rudge in Master Humphrey's Clock; Hard Times in 
Household Words; and Great Expectations in All the Year Round; A 
Tale of Two Cities. The last tale was also printed separately in 
eight monthly parts. 



46 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

sold probably hardly one copy to Dickens's four. With 
the other great Victorians the cheap pamphlet novel is 
only sporadic, by reason mainly of the growing opportunity 
for fiction in the literary miscellanies. Others indeed did 
copy the pamphlet plan or some variation of it. Several 
novels of Trollope appeared so, as did Middlemarch in four 
instalments in 1872. The enterprising Smith's experiment 
with Trollope's Last Chronicle of Barsetshire in 1866 and 
1867 practically represents the vanishing point of this most 
picturesque fashion of novel publication. In his autobi- 
ography, the author of The Last Chronicle records that ''the 
shilling magazines had interfered greatly with the success 
of novels published in numbers without other accompanying 
matter. The public, finding that so much might he had for a 
shilling, in which a portion of one or more novels was 
always included, were unwilling to spend their money on 
the novel alone. Feeling that this had certainly become the 
case in reference to novels published in shilling parts, Mr. 
Smith and I determined to make the experiment with six- 
penny parts. If I remember right, the enterprise was not 
altogether successful." 

Constable had foreseen that literature in cheap instal- 
ments was one of the great future possibilities of the pub- 
lishing trade, and Pierce Egan had proved it even before 
Constable's plan matured, forty-five years before The Last 
Chronicle was ready for printing. Those forty odd years 
mark pretty definitely the vogue of the fashion. Earlier 
conditions hardly warranted belief in sales of the necessary- 
magnitude for distinctly popular literature; later, so rapidly 
progressed the means of disseminating the kind of reading 
matter the public wanted, it was antiquated and no longer 
offered the best bargain for a shilling. But it served in its 
way the predominant purpose in current bookmaking, 
lower prices for popular reading matter. 



THE BACKGROUND OF SENSATIONALISM 47 

One feature of The Miscellany, as Constable originally 
planned it, was to have been Scott's novels in parts. As he 
had already greatly overstocked the market with high- 
priced editions, however, his London agents would not 
consent to cheap reissue. The popular edition which he pro- 
jected was finally achieved by Cadell, who after the failure 
acquired the copyright of Scott's work for £8500. Con- 
stable's overproduction gave his successor no immediate 
course except a cheap reissue. Consequently, Cadell re- 
printed the Waverley novels in forty monthly volumes at 
five shillings each; and thus Scott became accessible for 
about one third the original price. The publishers also 
took a lesson from ''the sixpenny science" publications and 
from Pickwick, by reissuing in 1842 in three forms — an 
expensive edition at twenty-eight shillings the volume; a 
second in twenty-five monthly volumes at four shillings each ; 
and a third in weekly parts, ninepence the part, the com- 
plete novels at two shillings each. Cur wen, whose figures 
are derived from James Mylne, one of the executors of 
Cadell's estate, gives the circulation of Scott's work from 
the time that publisher acquired the copyright to his death 
in 1849 as follows: of the novels 78,270 sets; of the verse 
41,340; of the prose works 8260; of the weekly instalments 
of the novels he issued 7,115,197; 674,955 of the verse; 
and 269,406 of the prose. ^ These republications of Scott 
were among the earliest attempts systematically to cheapen 
the price of fiction. Mr. Morton, ^ in searching for such 
efforts, found previously only one by Smith, Elder & 
Company in 1833 which they abandoned in less than a 
year. 

The extensive reprinting of popular favorites in cheap 
form was delayed for ten or fifteen years after Cadell's 

^ Curwen, History of the Booksellers, p. 138. 
2 Nation (N. Y.), April 3, 1913. 



48 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

experiment with Scott's work in weekly sheets. Colburn, 
who owned the copyrights of Lady Morgan, Godwin, Theo- 
dore Hook, and Bulwer-Lytton, took a hand as innovator 
in cheaper books when, in 1835, he began reissuing his 
Library of Standard Novelists — stories by those favorites — 
at a reduced rate. There was a cheap edition of Dickens 
beginning in 1847, in three series, pubUshed by Chapman 
& Hall and Bradbury & Evans in three halfpenny weekly 
numbers. Bulwer and Disraeli, whose early novels had 
remained among the exclusives in some cases for twenty- 
five or thirty years, suffered startling reductions. In 1863 
Bulwer was procurable in volumes selling for three shillings 
sixpence and also in two and six volumes; Disraeli could 
be had either at two and six the volume, or in cheaper 
shilling books. By that date, in fact, almost all novels 
written before 1855 which had enjoyed any considerable 
popularity could be bought for not more than three shillings 
sixpence. The high price imposed by Scott and his asso- 
ciates still persisted for first editions through the period of 
cheapening; but with three forms of issue thus evolved — 
serial publication in a miscellany, three volumes at a guinea 
and a half, and finally single volumes at three and six — the 
tendency was to shorten the interval between the three- 
volume and the cheap issue until it was generally about a 
year. 

The circulating library was also a powerful influence for 
cheaper novels. During the fifties and sixties the periodicals 
abound in advertisements of this institution, with Mudie's 
at the head of the list. Others that based a title to respecta- 
bility upon wide advertising were Smith & Sons, The 
English and Foreign, Cawthorn & Hutts, The Library 
Company, Booth's United Libraries, Coome's, and Mitchell's 
Royal. Mudie charged one guinea a year for class A sub- 
scription, and half as much for class B. From his adver- 



THE BACKGROUND OF SENSATIONALISM 49 

tising, it seems to have been customary for several families 
to purchase one subscription jointly. He also regularly 
sold out used copies of expensive books at bargain prices. 
The standard trade charge was still from ten to twelve 
shillings; Mudie's bargain sales reduced them to four or 
six. It is generally intimated of the circulating libraries 
that the three- volume novel at 31 and 6 produced their 
great profits, and that they reciprocated by driving the 
three-decker out of the market. 

Something of the power that they exercised upon the 
trade may be gathered from the scale on which they worked. 
Mudie had as many as 25,000 subscribers scattered through 
the kingdom, and bought of popular and high-priced books 
on a scale to correspond with his subscription list. In 1860, 
when he was attacked for the censorship he exercised in 
selecting books for the library in an article entitled Literature 
at Nurse, he replied in The Athenaeum with a short letter, 
at the end of which he enumerated his purchases since 
January, 1858. In less than three years he had added to 
Mudie' s 87,210 volumes of history and biography, 50,572 
of travel and adventure, 165,445 of fiction, 87,856 of science, 
religion, and miscellaneous reviews. The total is 391,083. 
He had 2400 copies of the third and fourth volumes of 
Macaulay's England, 2000 of Livingston's Travels, and traded 
in what his advertisements called ''the higher grade of fic- 
tion" on a like wholesale plan. Of the three-volume edition 
of Adam Bede, he took 1500 copies; of the later two-volume 
edition at twelve shillings he took 250 upon publication, 
250 more within a week, and 400 additional within two 
months. He could do much for a book by advertising that 
his library had on hand a hundred or a thousand copies, 
the more so with the Victorian public because he was a 
devout man, who wrote hymns, and aspired to exercise a 
censorship of letters. He was quite within the truth in the 



50 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

letter just mentioned when he cites the gigantic lists of 
his buyings as evidence of the popular confidence in his 
standards of inclusion. Mrs. Oliphant's remark that at the 
beginning of her career recognition by Mudie of a book 
of hers seemed like recognition from Heaven becomes 
intelligible enough. 

Mudie naturally waged war with conservative and high- 
priced publishers in two ways; he sought reductions for 
buying wholesale, and he fought for earlier reissues of 
popular novels in cheap form. The Blackwoods, for instance, 
were stoutly resisting his demands for discounts during the 
fifties. In 1858 John Blackwood was prepared to give Mudie 
10 per cent off on purchases of five hundred copies, but 
thought his customer ought to be so favored only when the 
purchase involved a risk. Mudie found a leverage within 
the trade itself, however; for before the middle of the cen- 
tury new conditions of the literary market had raised a new 
tribe of publishers of a different stamp from the Murrays and 
Constables. In the newer trade, which specialized in fiction, 
Colburn and Bentley were leaders. We get an interesting 
glimpse of conditions in the London market just before 
mid-century from an e\'idently well-informed writer for 
Eraser's in March, 1847. "All poems," he declares, "all 
works on morals or metaphysics are, with scarcely any 
exception, without price. Novels, when by popular authors, 
are paid for at a price varying from £100 to £500, and in 
one or two instances to £1500; when by authors unknown 
as novelists but tolerably known in other departments, they 
are at the publisher's risk and half profits; when by clergy- 
men, gentlemen of a literary turn, titled ladies, or aspiring 
clerks, the publisher either consents to print them at his 
own risk and profits, or else demands a sum of money vary- 
ing from £50 to £200. A first novel is never paid for. One 



THE BACKGROUND OF SENSATIONALISM 51 

publisher ^ is known to publish gratuitously any novel not too 
wretched, with the understanding that if it succeeds (what a 
latitude!) the author shall be paid something (another!) for 
his second novel. In this way he is enabled to keep up a run- 
ning fire of novels, scarcely one of which is ever paid for." 

TroUope's The Way We Live Now, a satire the nature of 
which the title indicates, presents in Lady Carbury one of 
these aspiring literary ladies, and shows amusingly enough 
what became of her three-volume novel The Wheel of For- 
tune, with which she followed up her historical study Criminal 
Queens. The novel must, of course, be in three volumes, 
and each volume must contain three hundred pages. ''Don't 
let it end unhappily," Mr. Loiter, her publisher, exhorts 
her, ''because though people like it in a play, they hate it 
in a book, and whatever you do. Lady Carbury, don't be 
historical. Your historical novel, Lady Carbury, isn't 

worth a straw," says Trollope, applying to his fictitious 

aspirant the words which one of the advisers of Smith, the 
energetic proprietor of The Cornhill, had used to him when 
he submitted a historical romance. Having ground out her 
nine hundred pages in accordance with Mr. Loiter's advice, 
Lady Carbury turned over to him the manuscript of The 
Wheel of Fortune. He shocked her by carelessly tossing it 
into a great sack beneath the counter — a sack as he calmly 
explained which was waiting to be filled with other hopeful 
three-deckers like her own before being sent to the company's 
reader as common freight. So few manuscripts, Mr. Loiter 
observes, would ever repay the expense of postage! 

Lady Carbury 's experience is probably not exaggerated; 
it is indeed singularly hke her creator's before he had mas- 

^ Probably Henry Colburn whom Eraser's hated as proprietor of 
The New Monthly, as the publisher of fashionable novels, and as a 
"progressive" man of business. Colburn was an adept in advertising 
his books. 



52 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

tered the trick of baking his tarts to the pubUc taste. Trol- 
lope came of a stock proHfic in novel-making; for his mother 
was one of the favorites of the generation that preceded his; 
his brother and sister both produced fiction good enough 
for pubUcation. His own early attempts both Anthony and 
his folk thought to be "an unfortunate aggravation of the 
family disease." His mother induced the publisher Newby 
to take his first story, The Macdermots, and to give him half 
profits. There were no profits — a circumstance which 
Trollope declares occasioned him no surprise; there were 
not more than fifty sales, he supposes. The Kellys and 
O'Kellys, published a year later, in 1848, by Colburn under 
the same half -profit agrement, was finally described by The 
Times as resembling a leg of mutton — ''substantial fare, 

— good, but a little coarse." ''Even that," says Trollope, 
"did not sell the book." Colburn printed 375 copies and 
sold 140 — so few that the book failed to pay for the cost of 
publication by £63, 10 shillings, IJpence. "The sale has 
been, I regret to say, so small that the loss upon the publica- 
tion is very considerable," — so Colburn wrote to Trollope, 

— "and it appears clear to me that although in consequence 
of the great number of novels that are published, the sale 
of each, with some few exceptions, must be small, yet it is 
evident that readers do not like novels on Irish subjects 
as well as on others. Thus you will perceive it is impossible 
for me to give any encouragement to you in novel-writing." 
In slightly less than ten years, four novels and a play — 
The Macdermots, The Kellys and O'Kellys, La Vendee, The 
Warden, and the drama. The Noble Jilt, the plot of which 
Trollope later utilized in Can You Forgive Herf brought the 
writer all told £40, a wage, as the novelist remarks, that he 
might easily have bettered at stone-breaking. But the 
chronicler of Barsetshire was stout of heart and did not 
pine even when "half profits" represented only a deficit. 



THE BACKGROUND OF SENSATIONALISM 53 

Many, like TroUope, had the itch for print, but few had his 
perseverance. Their indulgence of the malady seems to 
have provided the leverage mentioned previously. 

At all events the Newbys and Colburns, whose fiction 
often cost them little save for printing and advertising, were 
glad on many counts to sell great batches of novels to 
Mudie's at greatly reduced rates; for thus they made sales 
of a sort of doubtfully marketable goods and at the same 
time gained for them the valuable stamp of Mudie's ap- 
proval — Mudie's recognition of a book by putting it on 
his list might well seem to any struggling novelist less 
determined than Anthony Trollope almost like ^'recognition 
from Heaven." Mudie, too, asserts, in his reply to George 
Moore's Literature at Nurse, that he took pride in antici- 
pating the demand for fiction. If, as Mrs. Oliphant surmises, 
he sometimes secured great batches from Tinsley, Colburn, 
and Newby at half price, his zest for right guessing is com- 
prehensible on various grounds. Conservative publishers, 
therefore, like the Blackwoods, had the alternative of com- 
promising with the library leviathans or sacrificing the sale 
of whole editions. Yet, while Mudie's personal influence 
was certainly one of the strongest influences in bringing the 
price of fiction down, it is clear that the tendency toward 
cheaper reading matter was far too extensive to be greatly 
retarded or accelerated by a single influence, no matter how 
powerful. The circulating library was a power certainly, but 
there were others equally important. 

The novel at a guinea and a half was an unconscionable 
time dying, however; for although its fate was apparent at 
the time Pendennis was appearing, it did not entirely dis- 
appear until the nineties. The means of disseminating cheap 
literature by 1860, however, were keeping its sales down. 
The Tinsley Brothers, publishers of the unusually success- 
ful Lady Audley^s Secret, considered the sale of three editions 



54 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

of 500 copies each within eight or ten days a very considerable 
piece of business. If The Sixpenny Magazine, in which Mrs. 
Maxwell's story had previously appeared serially, could 
compare in circulation with such contemporaries as The 
Cornhill and All the Year Round, there were about sixty 
purchasers of the periodical form for one who bought the 
three volumes. This reactionary bookseller's device, more 
than the fabled leisurely lives of our grandparents, accounts 
for the long-drawn-out novel of 900 or 1000 pages. Lady 
Carbuiy, as we have seen, understood that a certain bulk 
was necessary for The Wheel of Fortune. Nor was this 
mere satire on TroUope's part. Clearly a public that paid 
a guinea and a half had justification for feeling defrauded by 
a thin book. Besant says the 100,000-word novel was 
esteemed "short measure." The profession indeed under- 
stood achievement of the three-volume novel to be a con- 
dition of first-rate success.^ Hence in large part the dilution 
and divagation of the ordinary Victorian novel — the end- 
less political disquisition of Disraeli, the pompous inanity 
of young Bulwer's reflections on things in general, the 
curiously elaborate descriptive effects of the Dickens of the 
forties, and the pedestrianism of Trollope, who flatly declares 
his principle of stretching his story to the size of his canvas. 
All more or less directly are connected with the famous 
price of thirty-one and six. Practically this price did more 
than can be accurately estimated to retard and distort in 
English fiction formal narrative art as such. To borrow 
Mr. Saintsbury's picturesque figure, it too often made the 
three-decker a sandwich with a sawdust filling. The burden 

^ Trollope again is authority for the statement that "short novels" 
had not generally been successful. Dickens gives wholesome advice 
to an aspirant to his columns, implying that the three-volume story 
is a test of a writer's ability that one should not attempt at first. One 
should begin more modestly, as he says he had done in his time. 



THE BACKGROUND OF SENSATIONALISM 55 

of length which it imposed, however, was more agreeable 
to the favorite domestic style of novel than to the novel of 
incident. The writer who accepted the canons of domestic 
fiction — that is, character and humor as more to be desired 
than plot — did not find the three volumes of three hundred 
pages each altogether unmanageable. The story of adven- 
ture, however, fared comparatively ill. How the fashion 
affected dramatic fiction is indicated subsequently. All 
this, however, gives definite meaning to the oft-repeated 
complaints of Wilkie Collins about novels which '' blunder 
continually in telling a story" and Reade's fiery invective 
against TroUope and George Eliot for using, ''after their 
kind," many words. 

Cheap miscellanies were no less powerful than the shilling 
pamphlet or the circulating library in making fiction cheaper. 
The first group of literary miscellanies, Blackwood' s^ Eraser's, 
and Colburn's New Monthly, affected the reduction very 
slightly if at all. From 1840 to 1850, when they began 
printing serial novels systematically, the number of instal- 
ments varied from four to ten or twelve. A four-instalment 
story could hardly be printed otherwise than in a single 
volume; a twelve-instalment story would make two volumes 
or three. Inasmuch as these periodicals sold at half crown 
the copy, there was no notable variation of the general trade 
price of 10 and 6 the volume. The bargain here was comprised 
in the additional matter, which was often delightful and 
notable; for it might include Wilson's essays, Maginn's 
poems, or Thackeray's burlesques. The magazines lower 
in the scale, however, achieved very notable reductions. 
In the two hundred and twenty periodicals which, according 
to Knight, were printed in London during the sixties, there 
must have been many modeled on and only less excellent 
than Dickens's twopenny weeklies. From the figures cited 
elsewhere the extent of their circulation may be guessed. 



56 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

In the instance of Dickens's weeklies, the fiction thus put 
before the multitude was often the work of the best noveUsts. 
Household Words and All the Year Round introduced to the 
public in the first printed form North and South, Hard Times, 
The Dead Secret, A Tale of Two Cities, The Woman in White, 
A Strange Story, and Hard Cash. No miscellany could 
boast a group of narrative contributors superior to Mrs. 
Gaskell, Wilkie CoUins, Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton, and 
Charles Reade. At the end of the review of the twenty- 
four sensation stories in The Quarterly article previously 
mentioned, the writer subjoins a table to make clear how 
readily accessible cheap periodicals were making sensational 
tales in the early sixties. According to this computation, 
while The Woman in White, No Name, Great Expectations, 
Mrs. Wood's Verner's Pride, and Mrs. Maxwell's Lady 
Audley^s Secret bring 31s. Qd. in three- volume form, the 
first four, all of which appeared first in Dickens's All the 
Year Round, cost respectively in periodical form 4s. 4d, 
6s. Sd., 6s. 8c?., and 4s. Ad. Mrs. Wood's story in Once a 
Week cost 8s., and Mrs. Maxwell's in The Sixpenny Magazine 
6s. Thus the instalment plan of publishing and of paying 
reduced the cost of novels to a mere fraction of the price 
set by Constable and Scott. 

In something less than forty years from the time of Con- 
stable's Miscellany, the book trade was revolutionized to 
meet new conditions under which practically every one was 
a reader of one sort of printed matter or another. Shilling 
pamphlet novel, circulating library, and long-delayed cheap 
miscellany united to end the regime of the picturesque old 
monarchs of the trade like Murray and Constable, and to 
establish in their place a new tribe of Newbys and Tinsleys. 
By the sixties the connection between cheap miscellanies 
and sensational fiction was a literary commonplace. By 
that time the millions seeking romantic diversion from the 



THE BACKGROUND OF SENSATIONALISM 57 

humdrum life of the industrial epoch existed; and the two- 
penny weekl}^ had brought it within the reach of all. 

4. The Novelist as Wage Earner 

By 1840 it appears from the generally increased dependence 
of the magazines upon serial fiction, as well as from Dickens's 
experience with Master Humphrey's Clock, that the vogue 
of the serial novel is firmly established. It may be some- 
thing of a parvenu yet, but those engaged either in writing 
it or in selling it begin to see visions of the profits it offers. 
From the writer's point of view there are at this juncture 
two problems to be solved — the first is to get a story which 
promises to be popular before as much of the reading public 
as possible, for the three-decker at 31 shillings will reach 
only the wealthy or well-to-do subscribers to the circulating 
libraries; the second is to gain a remuneration commen- 
surate with the sales. The famous publishers in the early 
part of the century — men like Constable, Murray, and 
Blackwood — were not only men of business but of ideals, 
who knew that their trade was more than mere commerce. 
They felt — and rather ostentatiously vaunted — their 
dignity and responsibility to public and to authors. They 
were patrons of the arts, and not less notable persons than 
the writers for whom they held the purse-strings. ''You 
will be gradually from this time rising into the higher duties 
of cultivating young men of genius of the day," John Murray 
wrote to the elder Blackwood just before Mag a began. 
Lockhart, then a youngster in Edinburgh, relates his wonder 
at the ''gentleman-like appearance" and manner of Con- 
stable. His unsophistication greatly amused Scott, whom 
he asked to identify the imposing personage. "Oh!" he 
reports Sir Walter as saying, "are you so green as not to 
know that Constable long since dubbed himself The Czar 
of Muscovy, John Murray The Emperor of the West, and 



58 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

Longman and his string of partners The Divan?" ''By 
God!" the Czar of Muscovy used to say in his most regal 
moments — ''I am all but the author of the Waverley 
novels." 

Leaving for the present the old monarchs of the trade, 
one cannot but perceive that when stories begin to sell as 
the Waverley novels or Pickwick sold, there must shortly 
be a readjustment of the novelist's remuneration. The 
conflict between writer and publisher is not to be thought 
of as the result of niggardliness among publishers. Those 
closest to the trade had little definite notion of what was 
coming. Lockhart's story of Constable's projected miscel- 
lany shows clearly enough that the Edinburgh circle thought 
it partly — perhaps largely — a bookseller's vagary. Liter- 
ary conditions, from the opening of the century, were under- 
going extraordinary changes, and the publisher's power 
arbitrarily to regulate and apportion the supply of books 
or the rewards for writers was passing. Chapman & Hall 
were probably quite as surprised as the young writer whom 
they paid £15 an instalment when the fifteenth pamphlet 
of Pickwick reached a sale of 40,000 copies. At most they 
expected to find another Pierce Egan. With the old regal 
attitude of Murray and Constable a thing of yesterday, 
pubUshers could hardly at once recognize the sweeping 
modifications that mere novels and novelists — not very 
highly esteemed in the old scheme of book-trading — were 
about to effect. The times when £1000 represented a fair 
price for a novel by a competent and tolerably popular work- 
man were gone.^ 

The career of Dickens exhibits the working out of these 

* Scott, of course, is an exception for many reasons. One of the 
popular men of letters long before he wrote novels, he also was prac- 
tical proprietor of a printing house. £1000 represented a high figure 
for fiction before Dickens; see scale of prices below. 



THE BACKGROUND OF SENSATIONALISM 59 

problems. Indeed, the significance of his fight for profits 
was hardly less great to the business of fiction-writing than 
was his success as a story-teller in perpetuating the vogue 
of fiction. His contribution in making the novelist the great 
hterary wage earner has probably never been sufficiently 
emphasized. 

The needy newspaper man who was overjoyed at the 
prospect of £15 for each number of Pickwick found himself 
suddenly famous; but the means of securing a fair share of 
the earnings was anything but easy. The agreement with 
Chapman & Hall stipulated twenty numbers of Pickwick 
at the rate mentioned, with a further understanding that, 
in case of success, Dickens was to receive further payment 
in proportion to the sales. The publishers, who ultimately 
made over to him from £2500 ^ to £3000, acknowledged that 
they had cleared something Uke £14,000. The figures are 
only approximate; but the writer received only from 17 
to 20 per cent of the profits on one of the most popular 
books of the century. Worse yet, enterprising publishers 
had discovered before he knew it himself that Pickwick 
promised a popularity for its writer greater than that of 
any living man of letters. Bentley, then planning a literary 
miscellany on a more popular plan than the Magas and 
Reginas, saw in Dickens the right man to be his editor and 
leading contributor; and just before the appearance of the 
sixth number of Pickwick bound him to a contract to edit 
the new periodical. He was to supply a serial to begin with 
the first number, and to furnish Bentley also with two more 
novels, one of which was to appear within a given time. 
When the new Bentley's Miscellany began with Oliver Twist 
for a leading attraction, Dickens found himself facing the 
impossible task of carrying on three stories at once. Pick- 
wick Papers were still being issued by Chapman & Hall, 
1 Forster's Life of Dickens, Chapman and Hall, 1872, vol. 1, p. 124. 



60 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

and the third novel, Barnaby Rudge,^ according to contract, 
had to be in active preparation. More than this, he now 
reahzed that his bargain was financially bad also, though 
how bad he was not quite aware, so loose had his business 
methods been. Bentley had been right in his choice of 
editor, for Oliver Twist struck public fancy only less favorably 
than Pickwick — a circumstance which added to the writer's 
desperation. How hopeless the situation appeared to him, 
his letter to John Forster testified.- ''The immense profits 
which Oliver has realized to its publisher and is still realiz- 
ing; the paltry, wretched, miserable sum it brought me 
(not equal to what is every day paid for a novel that sells 
fifteen hundred copies at most); the recollection of this, 
and the consciousness that I have still the slavery and 
drudgery of another work on the same journeyman terms; 
the consciousness that my books are enriching everybody 
connected with them but myself — and that I with such 
a popularity as I have acquired, am struggling in old toils, 
and wasting my energies in the very height and freshness 
of my fame, and the best part of my life, to fill the pockets 
of others, while for those who are nearest and dearest to 
me I can realize little more than a genteel subsistence ! — 
all this puts me out of heart and spirits." Wliatever the 
merits of the case, breaking with Bentley was inevitable. 
When Oliver Twist was completed in The Miscellany, Dickens 
retired from the editorship; and was absolved from his 
contract as to Barnaby Rudge upon payment of £2250 for 
the copyright and remainders of Oliver.^ The readjustment 

^ Apparently he was to receive about £500 for Barnaby. Forster, 
p. 114. 

2 Forster, pp. 139-140 (vol. 1). 

' Dickens had a similar lesson in the high-handed methods of pub- 
lishers in dealing with copyrights from Macrone, a small publisher 
who acquired the rights to the Sketches of Boz for £150. Upon the 



THE BACKGROUND OF SENSATIONALISM 61 

of the difficulty concerning Pickwick looked forward to a 
common form of agreement subsequently between novelist 
and publisher by which publisher gained only a temporary 
control of the copyright. The new arrangement with Chap- 
man & Hall guaranteed to Dickens one third interest in 
the copyright of that book after five years, upon condition 
of his producing another novel (Nicholas Nickleby) of the 
same length. 

His hard experience had taught him to make the most of 
his opportunity; and to it, in part at least, is due his journal- 
istic work after 1840. There were three of these popular 
journals which built their hopes upon his personal popu- 
larity — Master Humphrey's Clock, begun in 1840 and dis- 
continued just before the first visit to America; Household 
Words, which ran from March 1850 to May 1859; and All 
the Year Round, which first appeared in April 1859, and which 
he edited to the time of his death. The first of these was 
intended to relieve the drain consequent upon novel-writing 
by affording the opportunity for less consecutive and sus- 
tained composition, and not less to guarantee to the writer 
the profits of his popularity. But finding immediately that 
his public did not greatly care for the desultory description 
of journal he had projected in Master Humphrey's Clock, he 
was obliged to give them fiction in the form of The Old Curi- 
osity Shop to maintain his venture. He tried to keep his 
journals peculiarly his own; he wished them to provide a 
profitable market for other composition than three-volume 
novels. The most profitable — All the Year Round — which 
by Jul}^ of the year it was established had paid all debts 
incurred and earned £500 ^ — depended largely upon three- 
success of Pickwick, Macrone designed reissuing the book without 
consulting the author, and extracted about £2000 from Dickens and 
Chapman & Hall for copyright. — Forster, pp. 100-102. 

1 Forster, vol. 3, p. 216. 



62 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

volume novels. The new journal, opening with A Tale of 
Two Cities, later also brought out in the first form Great 
Expectations. Wilkie Collins contributed The Woman in 
White, No Name, and The Moonstone. Charles Reade con- 
tributed Hard Cash; Bulwer-Lytton, A Strange Story; Mrs. 
Gaskell, North and South. 

How industriously Boz was employing all the resources 
of the new market for popular literature which existed in the 
middle of the century will appear in the handling of A Tale 
of Two Cities. His old public steadily demanding his novels 
in the original pamphlet form, A Tale of Two Cities, which 
gave All the Year Round a propitious start, appeared in two 
serial forms as well as in the volume form.^ 

Even though he had forced what seemed a fair remunera- 
tion and had found periodical work profitable, Dickens 
decided in 1844 to make another change in his printing. As 
a result of a disagreement with Chapman & Hall about 
A Christmas Carol, he made over to Bradbury & Evans for 
£2800 a fourth interest in whatever he might write during 
the ensuing eight years; there was also a stipulation as to 
a possible periodical of which Dickens "might be only par- 
tially editor and author,"^ in which case his proprietorship 
of copyrights and profits was to be two thirds instead of 
three fourths. This agreement, after one renewal, terminated 
in 1859, when Dickens returned to his original pubKshers, 
Chapman & Hall; the agreement with them invariably 
calling for the reversion of copyright after a term of years. 
These arrangements seem to have set precedents which 

^ Other stories, like The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnahy Rudge, Hard 
Times, and Great Expectations, which were originally magazine serials, 
were printed in only two forms — as serials and as volumes; aside from 
these the first form of his major novels was that of the monthly shilling 
pamphlet. 

2 Forster, vol. 2, ch. 3, p. 66. Chapman & Hall Edition, 1873. 



THE BACKGROUND OF SENSATIONALISM 63 

the favorites among Victorian novelists could follow ; and one 
tolerably sure of a large audience would sell copyrights on 
Dickens's plan. George Eliot, as noted elsewhere, preferred 
to sell Romola for £7000 with a reversion of copyright rather 
than accept £10,000 for outright sale. And thus the popular 
story-teller had become powerful enough to sell at a far 
higher price than any other man of letters, and yet preserve 
a profitable interest in the product. Shortly after the middle 
of the century, therefore, the novelist had three distinct 
forms of publication — the shilling pamphlet, which gave 
way to the magazine serial, the high-priced three-volume 
edition for libraries and the wealthy, traditional reading 
class, and finally the popular priced reprint at three shillings 
sixpence or less, which was issued after the three-volume 
edition began to flag. Dickens by 1850 had explored the 
resources of the new market; the lucky venture, Pickwick, 
had launched the number trade on a wave of unparalleled 
prosperity; hard bargains with the publishers had influ- 
enced him toward journalism, and various experiments in 
method of publishing led him to adopt that of reversionary 
copyrights. 

The novelist's remuneration went up with a bound. From 
early in the century England had been paying better for 
periodical work than any other country in Europe; ^ the 
quarterlies were giving from sixteen to twenty guineas a 
sheet 2 to ordinary contributors. The Revue des Deux Mondes, 
when Nisard, De Vigny, Alfred de Musset, and Sainte-Beuve 
were among its contributors, paid its record price of 250 
francs a sheet to George Sand. An industrious man of letters 
in England could earn from £250 to £1000 a year by periodical 
work or novel-writing. According to Murray's scheme, when 

1 Eraser's, March, 1847, p. 286 fif., "The Conditions of Authors in 
England, Germany, and France." 

2 The Edinburgh earlier in the century gave ten. 



64 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

a partner in BlackwoocTs Magazine, Wilson and Lockhart 
were to divide £500 for the editorship, in addition to which 
they were to be paid for whatever they wrote. De Quincey 
when in Edinburgh was earning about £300 by contribu- 
tions to the same miscellany. Thackeray, after a year's 
work for the magazines, and so while still obscure, was 
probably doing a little better. Bulwer-Lytton, just before 
his marriage, when he was already considered a rising novel- 
ist, told his mother that by unremitting literary labor he 
could turn about £1000 a year. 

Before 1830 the novelist's remuneration is considerably 
higher than that of other men of letters; but the figures 
become paltry beside those for fiction from the forties on- 
ward. Earlier than 1840 it was an exceptional novel that 
brought £1000.' Constable refused Scott that sum for 
Waverley, a story by a practiced and favorite man of letters. 
More significant of the general scale are the prices paid Jane 
Austen and Susan Ferrier. Blackwood gave Miss Ferrier 
£150 for Marriage, a first novel; and £1000 for Inheritance, 
rather than lose it when the writer refused his offer of £500. 
Cadell's £1700 for the same novelist's Destiny was an unusual 
price. In 1829, Gait, who had some reputation as a con- 
tributor to Blackwood's, could get only £300 from Colburn 
for a novel. Lockhart was glad to get the same amount for 
Adam Blair, with conditional promise of £200 additional 
should the book go into a second edition; for Reginald 
Dalton he received £1000. The four novels of Jane Austen 
published before her death brought her about £700. 

If these figures are large relatively in comparison with 
those for periodical writers, they are small in comparison 
with those for the popular novelist from the time of Pick- 
wick onward. Bulwer-Lytton received £500 for Pelham, 
£800 for Disowned, £1500 for Devereux, £3000 each for the 
' Tom. Jones brought £600; The Italian £800. 



THE BACKGROUND OF SENSATIONALISM 65 

Caxton series from the Blackwoods with reversion of copy- 
right. Dickens, after several years of authorship, found 
that £200 for a monthly instalment, or £4000 for a twenty- 
part story, did not bring all the profit he might reasonably 
expect from his popularity. Thackeray was promised £350 
by the owners of The Cornhill Magazine for each number of 
a serial story, the profits of the cheap edition to be divided, 
those on the serial and first book form going to the pur- 
chasers, Smith, Elder & Co. The same novelist estimated 
that his greater stories brought him from £2000 to £6000 
each. The receipts from Esmond and Vanity Fair he es- 
timated at the lower figure; those from The Newcomes at 
£4000, and from The Virginians at £6000. Anthony Trol- 
lope, after a hard apprenticeship and a very unprofitable 
one, averaged about £1700 each for ten novels published 
from 1859 to 1864. Dickens received somewhere from £2500 
to £3000 for Pickwick, £3000 each for Barnahy Rudge and 
Nicholas Nicklehy for limited sale of copyright; £200 for 
each monthly number of Martin Chuzzlewit; and then on 
account of a disagreement over sales made the contract 
with Bradbury & Evans which he hoped would gain him 
a larger share of the profits. George Eliot, whose price had 
mounted to £1000 by the time of Felix Holt, seems to have 
won the record price for Romola, for which the owners of 
The Cornhill Magazine offered £10,000. The author pre- 
ferred to sell for £7000 with reversion of copyright. 

By mid-century the transformation was practically com- 
plete. Democracy was triumphant in letters as in society; 
and in consequence magazines and novels were the favorite 
literary forms. The novelist had become the great literary 
wage earner; the publisher is no longer the despot or the 
patron of letters, with power arbitrarily to apportion the 
supply of books or the remuneration of popular writers. 
Imagine Chapman & Hall or Smith ejaculating that they 



66 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

are all but authors of Pickvoick or Romola. Not less con- 
scientious perhaps than his predecessor, the publisher 
becomes primarily a man of business. In the new scale 
of winnings the distribution was not only partial to light 
literature, but also was often undiscriminating among the 
novelists themselves. Over against the soundness of the 
change as indicated by Dickens's earnings, or Thackeray's, 
or George Eliot's must be placed the very dissimilar experi- 
ences of say Meredith and Gissing. Undoubtedly, too, 
though the freer play of demand and supply was mainly 
wholesome, the changes increased the itch for print, and, 
abetted by the half -profits system, rendered attainment 
easy. This aspect of the new market is strikingly illustrated 
in one of the escapades of the notorious Maginn. For 
Eraser's Maginn reviewed Berkeley Castle, a worthless three- 
volume "fashionable" novel issued by Bentley in 1836. 
The book was written by Grantley Berkeley, who, taking 
advantage of the fashionable craze, narrated a not very 
distinguished or creditable family story. Inspired by 
whisky, Maginn dashed off a review of the novelist's 
effrontery, the personalities of which were quite as outra- 
geous as the tone of the wretched story. The enraged 
author sought the publisher and administered a beating from 
which Fraser never recovered. Upon Maginn's acknowledg- 
ing the article as his, a duel followed between author and 
reviewer. 

The novelist is likely to be a trifle deprecatory of his 
craft or even a little lacking in self-respect at the same 
time that he is exhilarated by the sense of new opportimity. 
Reade used to be fond of saying Nummus aliit litteras. In 
a new preface to Pelham, which reveals vivid recollection 
of the attacks by the Fraserian apaches, Bulwer wrote: 
"The Public is the only critic that has no motive or no 
interest in underestimating an author." In characteristic 



THE BACKGROUND OF SENSATIONALISM 67 

magniloquence he proceeds: The writer's "world is a mighty- 
circle of which envy and enmity can penetrate but a petty 
segment." The novelist, therefore, went about his business 
with the sobriety and industry of a professional man bent 
on getting on ; but he is wont to be surprised a little at him- 
self and at the public which takes him so seriously. His 
position as a man of letters, he is aware, has in it much that 
is anomalous. The traditional odium attaching to profes- 
sional writing and to novel-writing in particular explains 
Thackeray's occasional grimace, or Reade's occasional and 
inconsistent protestation of capability for better things than 
the spinning of profitable lies. In soliciting contributions 
to The Cornhill, Thackeray wrote to Trollope: '^I often say 
I am like the pastry-cook and don't care for the tarts, but 
prefer bread and cheese; but the public love the tarts 
(luckily for us) and we must bake and sell them." Reade 
was accustomed to eulogize the Waverley romances with the 
fervor of a reviewer of the twenties, and to envy "Sir Walter 
his first innings in this land of leal." Trollope, a frank 
journeyman, confesses "that my first object in taking to 
literature as a profession was that which is common to the 
barrister when he goes to the bar, and the baker when he 
sets up his oven: I wished to make an income on which I 
and those belonging to me might live in comfort." A main 
difference between the Victorian novelist and the novelist 
of an earlier time is that the former has become a laborer 
worthy of his hire, and is a little surprised at the circumstance. 
He feels that he ought to take himself seriously; and yet, 
mindful of the nature and reputation of novels, cannot in 
his heart always quite do so. He knows the formula "open 
sesame," but half suspects the magic to be illusory. Conse- 
quently he alternately describes himself as the fabricator 
of "profitable lies," or proclaims himself reformer and 
prophet. One thing only perhaps is steadily clear. Be he 



68 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

sensationalist or the soberest delineator of family life, the 
public is the first and final judge of him and his wares; and 
from the decision of that judge he asks no appeal. 

Yet upon serious minds the magnitude of the opportunity 
had a sobering effect; if Thackeray grimaces occasionally, 
he resolutely practiced the doctrine of his introduction to 
Pendennis — that the truth, even though unpleasant, is 
best from noveUst as from philosopher ; and if Reade patron- 
izes his craft, he also wrote that it was his duty to make 
readers aware of the evils so vividly revealed in Hard Cash 
and It is Never too Late to Mend. Probably never were 
writers more thoroughly persuaded than the great Victorian 
novelists of the duties of authorship. As George Eliot said, 
the person "who publishes writings inevitably assumes 
the ofiice of teacher or influencer of the public mind. Let 
him protest as he will that he only seeks to amuse and has 
no pretension to do more than while away an hour of leisure 
or weariness — ' the idle singer of an empty day ' — he can 
no more escape influencing the moral taste, and with it the 
action of the intelligence, than a setter of fashions in furni- 
ture or dress can fill the shops with his designs and leave the 
garniture of persons and houses unaffected by his industry." 
The divergence in practice between, let us say, Charles 
Reade and the framer of these words could hardly be 
greater; but even these extremists would have been at one 
in the ideal of authorship which stresses the immediate 
connection of letters and conduct. And so sensationalist 
seasoned his melodrama with preachment, perhaps of doubt- 
ful relevancy or congruity; realist added a dash of the 
sensational that the populace devoured with most avidity. 

5. Miscellany and Serial Fiction 

At first sight the fact that popular miscellanies and novels, 
the two characteristic vehicles of present-day popular 



THE BACKGROUND OF SENSATIONALISM 69 

literature, developed their vogue in the nineteenth century 
practically independently of each other seems odd. Yet 
nothing about the great magazines which made literary 
history, such as BlackwoocTs, Fraser's, and Colburn's New 
Monthly, is clearer than that they rested no systematic or 
general appeal upon instalment fiction prior to 1840 or 
thereabout. Previously there had been a few — a very 
few — sporadic examples of serial novels, notably Michael 
Scott's Tom Cringle's Log in Blackwood^s, and one of Theodore 
Hook's Gilbert Gurney tales in Colburn's periodical; but 
these were certainly not deliberate experiments or conscious 
editorial departures. Blackwood or Colburn having Scott 
or Hook upon his hands found a serial story a practicable 
enough space-filler — nothing more. Now the serial idea 
was by no means a product of the new journalism; it is 
present, and near the form of serial fiction, in The Spectator, 
a full century earlier than the first copy of Maga. It was well 
enough known to the obscure magazine-makers during the 
last third of the eighteenth century. Smollett, indeed, had 
published a novel serially. Why the specific connection 
between the miscellany and the long story in parts, which 
is now a journalistic commonplace, should have waited 
almost a quarter of a century after Blackwood's first startled 
Edinburgh is not readily apparent. 

The explanation even in outline is complex, but the main 
causes are not difficult to trace. When Blackwood's and 
Eraser's are spoken of as popular, it is essential to recall 
that ''popular" is a relative term. Popular in comparison 
with the less frequently published quarterlies, which accord- 
ing to Jeffrey professed to discuss first principles of the topics 
they handled, these new monthly magazines with their less 
formal and more varied contents certainly were; in any 
twentieth-century sense, according to which popular means, 
among other things, from forty to a hundred pages of reading 



70 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

matter for a shilling or a dime, designed for the million and 
often reaching them, popular they were not. In any current 
terms Blackwood's and Eraser's at 2s. Gd were costly. Nor 
was their circulation extensive as such matters are reckoned 
nowadays. Soon after the earlier magazine began its 
notorious career under Lockhart and Wilson, we learn from 
one of the Scorpion's letters to an old schoolfellow that 
Blackwood was printing 5000 copies, and ''hoping soon to 
sell as many." The Edinburgh Review, which had enjoyed 
first innings in the new periodical market, had shortly run 
its circulation up to twice that figure — a phenomenal sale 
indeed as times went. The Review, Lockhart says, set Con- 
stable on his feet. Its prosperity grew with time, despite 
the Tory Quarterly 1809. Something of the tremendous ex- 
pansion of magazine trade through Victorian times may be 
inferred from some figures of Charles Reade relative to his 
Wandering Heir, which was published as a holiday number 
of the London Graphic in 1872. Reade was then at the 
height of his popularity. The magazine which brought out 
his romance was one of the shilling group begun by The 
Cornhill and Macmillan's about 1860. 200,000 copies, 
Reade avers, were sold in Europe in that form; 150,000 
more were disposed of in the United States by the Harpers, 
who published the story in instalments in their Weekly. 

Moreover, the new ventures had no settled literary policy. 
The easy irresponsibility with which Blackwood and his 
lieutenants evaded and shifted from each to each the blame 
for the libels and vituperation in which they recklessly 
indulged is typical also of their literary program. The 
facility of men like Wilson, Lockhart, and Maginn in their 
palmy days, although the stories, like heroic tales generally, 
have perhaps taken on accretions, was indubitably extra- 
ordiaary. Lockhart could readily produce between dark and 
daylight a useful article a sheet in length. In the exuberant 



THE BACKGROUND OF SENSATIONALISM 71 

and frolicsome early days of Maga, Wilson was of the opinion 
that a good journalist ought to turn off single-handed most 
of the copy needed for one issue in two days. Kenealy 
declares that Maginn, while a leading contributor and one 
of the main dependences of Fraser^s, invariably wrote his 
entire assignment in the three or four days that preceded 
publication. In this facility and in the inspiration of the 
moment they mainly put their trust. Hence the miscel- 
lanies characteristically lived from hand to mouth; articles 
were projected — even announced — and never printed. 
Owner or editor hardly planned what was to come next. 
Such policy as most of them had was provided by party 
politics, which were also a prime incentive in bringing them 
into being. When Sir Walter Scott once reproved Jeffrey 
for a needlessly partisan article in The Edinburgh, the editor 
retorted that although literature was one leg of the journal, 
politics was the right leg. Its inclinations being Whiggish, 
Murray brought out The Quarterly that Tories might have 
their own distinctive organ. Blackwood's was originally 
intended to counteract locally the Whig influence of The 
Edinburgh, controlled by Constable, the great publisher of 
the North, whose rival Blackwood aspired to be. Maginn, 
according to Kenealy and Shelton Mackenzie, had the same 
object in all the periodicals he was influential enough to 
dominate — whatever else he did or suffered to be done, 
a condition of his ascendancy was unwavering support of 
high Tory opinion. All this appears clearly in his foreword 
to the first volume of Eraser's in 1830, in which the distribu- 
tion of emphasis between light literature and party politics 
is highly significant. ''We suppose it may be taken for 
granted that all readers in this reading age and country so 
well understand what a magazine ought to contain that it 
would be a waste of time to say that we are to be a literary 
miscellany, etc." So much for mere literature; its politics 



72 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

are not so readily to be taken for granted, it appears, for 
Maginn requires five pages to set forth that subject. Ten 
years later, when Regina had completed a highly successful 
decade, the same writer summed up its progress in a review 
wherein he boasted that the miscellany had more than repaid 
all abusive enemies in their own coin. 

The dead and gone rancors of party politics might gladly 
be left in their grave had they not been so violent as long 
to defer settled literary policy, and to deform criticism^ 
Hazlitt upon Coleridge, Blackwood^s upon Keats, Fraser's 
upon Bulwer are little enough edifying in all conscience; 
but the fact is that supporting one's opinions was understood 
to involve personal abuse of one's opponent without especial 
reference to the book he had written. Such criteria made 
Hazlitt call Christabel drivel and allude to Coleridge's use 
of drugs; they caused Blackwood's to assault Keats because 
he was the friend of Leigh Hunt. To the Tories at Edin- 
burgh a distinction among odious Cockneys could matter 
very little. So Eraser's abused Bulwer less because he was 
a fop who perpetrated ambiguous Newgate romances than 
for the reason that he was a conspicuous liberal. Some 
mitigation for this there is — though not much — in the 
high feeling engendered by reform agitation. Virtually 
such writing was not anonymous, at least in the first stages 
of magazine-making. Maginn, brought to bay for a vicious 
review in 1836, protests that at no time during the preceding 
twenty years to the best of his recollection had there been 
more than fifty regular contributors to the miscellanies. 
But there is little extenuation for the shuffling with fact on 
the part of the magazine-makers' biographers by which 
Wilson is held less guilty than Lockhart or Lockhart than 
Wilson. There is no whitewashing really possible; for too 
obviously one and all, whether Blackwood's staff or Fraser's, 
found the brutal war of personal abuse, the deliberate per- 



THE BACKGROUND OF SENSATIONALISM 73 

version of criticism, and dexterity in hairbreadth avoidance 
of Hbel most exhilarating journaHstic exercise. 

Traditionally, moreover, the novel was merely a book, 
and so it remained primarily down to 1840. Between 1830 
and 1840 the reduction of the paper tax, which had been 
prohibitive to cheap miscellanies, gave opportunities for 
ventures such as Bentley^s Miscellany, of which Dickens was 
first editor and for which he wrote Oliver Twist, and Master 
Humphrey's Clock, Boz's first private periodical attempt. 
Master Humphrey's Clock marks pretty definitely the point at 
which periodicals and the novel in instalments join fortunes. 
It has been explained previously that The Clock was intended 
in part as an outlet for Dickens's stray production — occa- 
sional essays and such stories as did not fulfil conventional 
requirements of the novel. It was intended indeed as a 
kind of modem Spectator. But the audience on which 
cheaper periodicals depended was not the same as Black- 
wood's or Eraser's audience. The public, understanding 
Dickens's title to promise another novel, bought about 70,000 
copies of his first issue; when they discovered their mistake 
their interest diminished. Subscriptions fell off so markedly 
that the proprietor had to substitute for his original intention 
The Old Curiosity Shop in serial form. At the same time 
Thackeray's Shabby Genteel Story was running in Eraser's 
and Samuel Warren's once famous Ten Thousand a Year 
in Blackwood's. From this point onward the dependence 
of the popular miscellany upon serial fiction was practically 
continuous. It is safe to say that the bulk of instalment 
fiction in Blackwood's, Eraser's, or The New Monthly from 
1840 to 1860 singly is greater than the gross amoimt that 
they collectively had published previously. 

Moreover, as indicated elsewhere, fiction was at a low 
ebb when the new journalism began; it was not among the 
approved types with which a critic who aimed at getting 



74 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

down to ''first principles " — the phrase is Jeffrey's — needed 
to concern himself. The novel awaited Sir Walter's *'big 
bow wow." The sensational success of Waverley, the specu- 
lations as to authorship, or the panegyrics with which the 
critics greeted its successors, are well known. Hazlitt, in 
a sentiment not so outrageous as itr seems when taken in the 
light of current opinion, declared that John Scott, the un- 
fortunate editor of The London Magazine, went to his death 
bed "with some degree of satisfaction, inasmuch as he had 
written the most elaborate panegyric on the Scotch novels 
that had yet appeared." Jeffrey could find no parallel to 
express his wonder save Shakespeare. ''Since the time when 
Shakespeare wrote his thirty-eight plays in the brief space 
of his early manhood — besides acting in them and drinking 
and living idly with the other actors — and then went care- 
lessly to the country, and lived out his days a little more 
idly, and apparently unconscious of having done anything 
extraordinary at all — there has been no such prodigy of 
fertility as the anonymous author before us. In the period 
of little more than five years he has founded a new school 
of invention; and established and endowed it with nearly 
thirty volumes of the most animated and original composi- 
tions that have enriched English literature for a century — 
volumes that have cast sensibly into the shade all contempo- 
rary prose and even all recent poetry (except perhaps that 
inspired by the Genius — or the Demon — of Byron), and, 
by . . . variety, vivacity, magical facility and living present- 
ment of character, have rendered conceivable to the later 
age the miracles of the mighty Dramatist." ^ Scott himself 
wondered at the extent of the imitation his novels called 
out, and congratulated himself upon possession of some 
advantages over all competitors. Scott and Dickens were 
of all English novelists indeed most nearly universal; when 
^ Edinburgh Review, January, 1820. 



THE BACKGROUND OF SENSATIONALISM 75 

critics like Jeffrey and Hazlitt talk thus, and shilling pam- 
phlets of a novel sell to the extent of 40,000 copies, a new 
era opens for prose fiction. 

Directly then the three-volume story owed little before 
1840 to the periodicals. Blackwood^s and Colburn's New 
Monthly, both owned by prosperous publishers who were 
constantly printing books of fiction, sufficiently illustrate. 
The Edinburgh miscellany very early commanded the serv- 
ices of five writers with claims to consideration as novelists 
in Michael Scott, James Hogg, John Gait, Wilson, and 
Lockhart. Gait's Ayrshire Legatee was printed in four 
instalments during 1820; and Michael Scott's Tom Cringle's 
Log ran intermittently for several seasons about a decade 
later. In 1818, the second year of the magazine, Blackwood 
published Susan Ferrier's Marriage. Naturally too the 
publisher brought out the novels of his editors — The Trials 
of Margaret Lyndsay, Valerius, and Adam Blair. These, 
like Marriage, were reviewed in Maga ; but Nodes Amhrosi- 
anae, however their attractiveness has faded, were better 
periodical material in the twenties than Gait's novels or 
Lockhart's. 

Colburn's magazine is much more significant of the delay, 
inasmuch as that publisher early achieved notoriety as a 
rather indiscriminate trader in fiction. In 1830, after the 
poet Campbell had conducted The New Monthly for some 
years as an unpartisan journal, he was succeeded by Bulwer-' 
Lytton. Bulwer at that date was a flamboyant young lion 
in letters and a rising liberal. As a novelist he had already 
popularized the fashionable story in Pelham several years 
earlier. His selection to the post was a picturesque bid for 
popularity more than anything else, like Bentley's choice 
of Dickens; for to the public Lockhart, Wilson, and Maginn, 
the chiefs of the great monthlies, were hardly picturesque 
figures at all. Colburn already stood in the relation of pub- 



76 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

lisher of his novels to his editor, as Blackwood did to Wilson 
and Lockhart; but Paul Clifford and Eugene Aram came out 
exclusively as three-volume novels. The New Monthly had 
its serial articles, like its rival. During Campbell's regime 
it contained his Lectures on Poetry; in 1830 and 1831 it 
contained a series devoted to Living Literary Characters, 
comprising sketches of Walter Scott and Colburn's own 
favorites, like John Poole and Bulwer; in 1831, Sketches 
of the English Bar, which opened with a study of Brougham; 
and in 1832 and 1833, Lady Blessington's Journal of Con- 
versations with Lord Byron. Serial fiction began in this mis- 
cellany not under Bulwer-Lytton's editorship, but under 
that of his successor, Theodore Hook. The volumes devoted 
by that notorious man of letters to Gilbert Gurney, beginning 
in 1835, continued more or less regularly as instalments 
during Hook's incumbency. 

The principal use which Colburn made of his magazine 
in the interest of his rapidly growing novel-traflBc was quite 
other. It was a very serviceable means of advertising the 
batches of novels that came from his press. One can hardly 
believe that the Bulwer who is reviewed so flatteringly here 
is the same writer whom Fraser^s and The Quarterly so 
savagely abuse. ''Perhaps never were characters more 
subtly analyzed," says The New Monthly reviewer of Dis- 
owned. A blanket notice of Colburn novels begins — ''We 
are bound in duty to devote a few pages this month to the 
subject which heads our article; first because five of our 
most popular writers have selected this gloomy December 
as a fit and proper time to gladden and enlighten the public ; 
and next because all the said five happen to have been 
among the most regular and best approved contributors to 
The New Monthly Magazine — Mr. Bulwer, Mr. Hook, Mr. 
James, Mrs. Hall, and Mr. Grattan." Colburn's log-rolling 
had in fact become notorious in the trade by 1830. In A 



THE BACKGROUND OF SENSATIONALISM 77 

Letter to Edward Bulwer-Lytton by Thackeray in Fraser^s 
for December, 1831, Colburn and Bentley are especially 
reprehended for their novels and for their unscrupulous 
methods of advertising them. How much must be allowed 
in Regina's onslaughts for trade rivalry between competing 
miscellanies, for envy of Bulwer's success and genuine dis- 
trust of his early romantic vein, and for political differences, 
it is quite impossible to determine. 

The charge against the publisher existed, however, quite 
independently of his connection with Bulwer-Lytton. In 
August, 1831, Fraser^s reviewed ten or twelve '^ novels of 
the season," including apparently two egregious specimens of 
Pelhamism from Colburn's shop. Underneath the usual 
dirty rubbish of vituperation and abuse, two distinct charges 
to which Regina returns again and again are preferred against 
Colburn and Bentley; that of systematically employing 
the periodicals in which they are interested to puff novels 
printed by the firm; and secondly that of trading upon 
Colburn's reputation as an eligible publisher in the interests 
of mediocre and nasty novels. The periodicals referred to 
are The New Monthly, of which Colburn was proprietor, The 
Court Journal, which he and Bentley jointly controlled, and 
The Literary Gazette, in which Colburn had a third share. 
Now the last mentioned of these was favorably known as 
one of the earliest organs of disinterested criticism; but the 
citations from The Court Journal, in which for example a 
novel by Horace Smith is extolled as the equal of Quentin 
Durward, gives color to the charge. The gist of the whole 
matter is as follows: ^'That Mr. Colburn has in his time 
published some good books we do not deny. He commenced 
his career respectably, and gave the world sundry publica- 
tions of a reputable nature, which established his name as 
an eligible publisher. Mr. Colburn, in connection with his 



78 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

partner,^ Mr. Bentley, is still in possession of notoriety; 
and we affirm, boldly and seriously, that, relying on his 
former fame, which had been unduly spread through paid 
puffs and juggling quackery, he now publishes . . . works 
which are not only immeasurably below the standard of 
even correct writing, — we mean correct literally, in point 
of language and style, — but that he is a culpable dis- 
seminator of novels abounding in heartless profligacy, gross- 
ness, and obscenity." 

The essential fact, obviously, is that Colburn is the pub- 
lisher of the new regime. Generous to his writers and per- 
sonally genial, he was engaged in selling the kind of thing 
''the public want." How energetically he went about the 
business appears in one of John Blackwood's stories. Col- 
burn, so his rival publisher says, caused a certain writer 
named Davidson to hale the sensational publisher into court 
concerning the return of one of Davidson's manuscripts. 
Within three days Colbum published the book. Again, 
hearing that Sydney Smith, who had recently suffered losses, 
must be in want of money, Colburn visited him to propose 
his writing a three-volume story. Smith, according to 
Blackwood again, proposed to take an "Archdeacon for a 
hero, and make him intrigue with the pew-opener. 'Under 
the hassock,' he went on, 'would be a good place for deposit- 
ing the love letters.' 'Oh,' says Colburn, 'we will leave all 
that to your well-known taste and judgment.'" 

It is significant that although by 1830 a publisher like 
the proprietor of The New Monthly had signalized himself 
as a vendor of fiction, he had not discovered the suitability 
of his favorite wares for periodical purposes earlier than his 
rivals. By 1840 he had gathered about him some serviceable 

^ Bentley was originally Colburn's chief printer. For two years, 
1850-1852, they were partners. Annals of a Publishing House y II, 
356-357. 



THE BACKGROUND OF SENSATIONALISM 79 

and popular minor novelists, including those who fed the 
appetite for ''fashionable novels"; such contributions as 
Mrs. Trollope's The Barnahys in America, Charles Chester- 
field, The Youth of Genius, and The Robertses on their Travels; 
shorter tales by Mrs. Gore; others by John Poole and by 
Lady Blessington indicate the taste and the literary level 
of the modernized New Monthly. 

The union of miscellany and novel is generally held to 
have exercised a considerable and a regrettable influence 
upon narrative style. John Timbs, in his book A Century 
of Anecdote from 1760 to 1860, has stated the conventional 
view briefly in reference to Tom Cringle's Log, one of Black- 
wood's earliest serials. "That story/' says Mr. Timbs, ''is 
perhaps the earliest specimen of that vicious plan of narrative- 
writing which renders it indispensable that each number 
have its sensation incidents, so that when the work is com- 
pleted it generally tires you with its thick-set catastrophes." 
Such was the general opinion of reviewers and journalistic 
critics of the last generation. Sir Walter Besant, a prolific 
serial writer himself, understands the matter differently. 
In his Autobiography he writes: "I saw in The Spectator 
the other day a notice of a certain recently deceased writer 
who, the reviewer pointed out, had most unfortunately 
brought out his novels in serial form, so that he was com- 
pelled to end each instalment with a sensational incident, 
a circumstance which spoiled his work. One would really 
think that a person allowed to write for The Spectator would 
have known better than to talk such rubbish; he or she 
would at least, one would think, have sufficient knowledge 
of the history of fiction to know that Dickens, Thackeray, 
Trollope, George Eliot, Charles Reade, Wilkie Collins, 
George Meredith, William Black, Blackmore, Hardy — 
everybody of note among modern novelists — brought out 
their novels in serial form. Yet this fact has not spoiled 



80 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

their work. I have, if that affects the question, brought 
out nearly all my novels in serial form first, and I may safely 
aver that I never felt, recognized, or understood that there 
was the least necessity for ending an instalment with an 
incident. There is, however, no end to the rubbish — mostly 
ignorant and partly malevolent — that is written and pub- 
lished about novels." ^ 

With the issue between Sir Walter and Mr. Timbs as it 
affects serial fiction in miscellanies generally, we need not 
concern ourselves. What the special methods of serial 
writing were in the estimation of the Dickens group, what it 
consisted in, how far the conventional opinion of reviewers 
as represented by Mr. Timbs describes an essential charac- 
teristic of it, and what its relation was to their theory of the 
melodramatic novel — are questions of more immediate 
importance. If we are to progress, we must begin by dis- 
tinguishing classes of periodicals and their manifest prefer- 
ences in the type of story selected for serial use. 

It has been noted earlier that the older miscellanies which 
sold for half a crown were not in the modern sense popular. 
The society to which they appealed is clearly enough indi- 
cated by their Tory politics. Late in the forties, also, when 
cheaper periodicals like Dickens's were flourishing, fiction 
was taking the domestic turn marked by Vanity Fair. The 
domestic being the newest and also Victorian high-brow 
sort of thing, the more pretentious magazines show a clear 
preference for that variety. Fraser^s through that decade 
had some of Thackeray's minor tales and Kingsley's Alton 
Locke, which, though sensational, was sensational in a 
radically different sense from Lady Audley's Secret. Black- 
wood's at the end of those ten years was bringing out Lord 
Lytton's Caxton series. The Cornhill began with Trollope's 
Framley Parsonage; its rival Macmillan's with a story by 

1 Pp. 191-192. 



THE BACKGROUND OF SENSATIONALISM 81 

Hughes of Tom Brown fame. But the shilHng magazines 
by no means contemned sensational tales of the better 
sort. In The Cornhill, for instance, may be found Armadale 
and Put Yourself in his Place. Other serials were Philip, 
The Claverings, Romola, and The Adventures of Harry Rich- 
mond. That Thackeray, TroUope, George Eliot, or Meredith 
in any sense felt bound by such rules for serial writing as 
were suggested by Timbs or The Spectator reviewer is absurd. 
They would reiterate Besant's position exactly. 

Earlier, however, it has appeared that the cheaper maga- 
zines were the especial haunts of serials of the more stirring 
sort. The Quarterly in 1863 pointed out that four of the 
most notable sensation novels were printed first in Dickens's 
All the Year Round. Only one story of our trio, Dickens, 
Reade, and Collins, ever appeared in the magazines that 
originally sold for half a crown; Reade, late in life, con- 
tributed The Woman Hater to Blackwood's anonymously, 
apparently Uke Trollope and Lord Ljrtton, in a few instances, 
to ascertain the reception of an unsigned story of his. All 
except three of Dickens's novels were brought out first as 
shilling pamphlets. Four long stories of his own composi- 
tion he published serially in his own journals. Of our trio 
of sensationalists Reade was least regular as magazine con- 
tributor. For about eight years at the beginning of his 
career he published no story in parts. During that period, 
from 1852 to 1860, he wrote Peg Woffington, Christie John- 
stone, It is Never too Late to Mend,^ White Lies, and Love me 
little, Love me long. It is significant that all these except Love 
me little were first plays. His first tale in instalments was 
A Good Fight, the first sketch for The Cloister and the Hearth. 
A Good Fight appeared serially in Bradbury & Evans's 
cheap miscellany Once a Week. Hard Cash was written for 

1 Reade's drama Gold is worked over in that part of It is Never too 
Late to Mend which deals with Australia. 



82 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

All the Year Round for 1863; Griffith Gaunt for The Argosy, 
in which it ran serially in 1866; Foul Play for the proprietors 
of The Cornhill, who published it in weekly parts; Put 
Yourself in his Place for The Cornhill in 1870; A Terrible 
Temptation for CasselVs Magazine in 1871; The Wandering 
Heir for the Christmas number of The Graphic in 1872; 
A Woman Hater for Blackwood^ s in 1877. Collins's serial 
writing down to Dickens's death was mainly contributed 
to his friend's miscellanies. Household Words contained 
Sister Rose, After Dark, The Dead Secret; All the Year Round 
contained The Queen of Hearts, The Woman in White, No 
Name, and The Moonstone. Of Collins's other stories which 
were written before 1870, Armadale came out serially in 
The Cornhill; The New Magdalen in The Temple Bar. 

Dickens and his group are therefore pioneers in serial 
writing because they began early and practiced constantly 
for popular magazines. The term popular magazine, it must 
be remembered, has a definite meaning; it signifies a miscel- 
lany, perhaps a weekly, which sold for not more than a 
shilling. More costly magazines were not designed for the 
taste of the rank and file. But the influence of serial pub- 
lication upon the Dickensians' narrative style is not simple 
because of their devotion to the stage and the methods of 
acted melodrama. Theoretically these influences are separ- 
ate — practically they call for much the same set of expedients 
in narrative method. Yet, that there was in the estimation 
of Dickens and his group a peculiar procedure for serial 
story-writing is incontestable. '^ There must be a special 
design to overcome that specially trying mode of publica- 
tion," he writes to Mrs. Brookfield, February 26, 1866, 
in explanation of refusal for All the Year Round of a tale of 
hers that he found mainly excellent, ''and I cannot better 
express the difficulty and labor of it than by asking you to 
turn over any two weekly numbers of A Tale of Two Cities, 



THE BACKGROUND OF SENSATIONALISM 83 

or Great Expectations, or Bulwer^s story, or Wilkie CoUins's 
or Reade's . . . and notice how patiently and expressly 
the thing has to be planned for presentation in these frag- 
ments." In a letter to Miss Watson in November, 1854, he 
complains of the difficulty of writing Hard Times as follows : 
"The compression and close condensation necessary for that 
disjointed form of publication gave me perpetual trouble." 
Subsequently he spoke of A Tale of Two Cities, the opening 
serial of All the Year Round, in very similar terms. 

What Dickens meant by "compression and close condensa- 
tion" may be learned from his experience with Mrs. GaskelFs 
North and South and A Dark Night's Work, which were 
originally published in instalments in his miscellany. In 
the preface to the volume form of the former story, Mrs. 
Gaskell has recorded that "On its first appearance in 
Household Words, this tale was obhged to conform to the 
conditions imposed by the requirements of a weekly publica- 
tion, and likewise to confine itself within certain advertised 
limits that faith might be kept with the public. Although 
these conditions were made as light as they well could be, 
the author found it impossible to develop the story in the 
manner originally intended, and, more especially, was 
compelled to hurry on events with an improbable rapidity 
toward the close. In some degree to remedy this obvious 
defect various short passages have been inserted, and several 
new chapters added." The editor's side of the story is 
fortunately preserved in his correspondence with Wills in 
such a way as to make Dickens's doctrine of serial writing 
tolerably plain. "I am alarmed," he tells his sub-editor 
on August 19, 1854, "at the quantity of North and South. 
It is not objectionable for a beginning, but would become 
so in the progress of a not compactly and artfully devised 
story." From several of his letters at this time it appears 
that the printers have very faultily underestimated the bulk 



84 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

of North and South; whereupon Dickens sets Mrs. Gaskell 
to cutting down and threatens to change printers should 
the error occur again. This insistence upon brevity, ''close 
condensation," is not all, however, nor yet perhaps the main 
consideration. 

"When I read the beginning of this story," he writes Wills 
a few days later, "I felt that its means of being of service 
or disservice to us mainly lay in its capacity of being divided 
at such points of interest as it possesses." Another story 
by Mrs. Gaskell, A Dark Night's Work, reveals Dickens's 
concern with the same problem of division. ''The third 
portion," he tells Wills, "consists of chapters 7 and 8. . . . 
The 4th portion begins with the printed slip numbered 27. 
Turn over the slips until you come to the one numbered 32. 
At the end of the first paragraph after the words, 'happened 
at a sadder time,' insert chapter X — which will then begin 
— 'Before the June roses were in full bloom,' Turn on again 
until you come to the slip numbered 34, and stop that 
portion at the end of the first paragraph after it, after the 
words, 'except Dixon, could have gone straight to her 
grave.' 

"The 5th portion will begin chapter 11, 'In a few days 
Miss Munroe married.' The story must be altogether in 
6 portions, and I will send you the dividing of the last 
two to-morrow." 

Neither here nor elsewhere did Dickens speak specifically 
of the incident as affected by the serial form. The implica- 
tion of his phrase "a compactly and artfully devised story" 
is plain enough. He clearly demanded of the instalment 
fiction brevity and the capability of being divided so as to 
maintain interest — both of which qualities were not readily 
met with in Victorian novels. These requirements by no 
means necessitate the melodramatic climax or even incident. 
The care about divisions fundamentally means nothing 



THE BACKGROUND OF SENSATIONALISM 85 

more than that the instalment, instead of being divided 
mechanically upon the basis of number of words, should 
have a certain unity of tone or of action — a congruity of 
its own. Whither this demand led will appear later. It is 
sufficient to note here that the doctrine of the first great 
serialist quite corresponds with Besant's declaration. 
Dickens's demand for compression and swiftness found 
illustration in A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, 
the only novels which he contributed to All the Year Round. 
The form of publication partly explains why they are only 
from one half to two thirds the length of Our Mutual Friend 
and David Copper field. As they appear serially in All the 
Year Round, moreover, they are notably free from "climax 
and curtain" endings for instalments. 

Still this insistence upon close condensation and division 
at points of interest clearly tends to a relatively bald narra- 
tive and repeated thrilling climax — to the form of narrative 
which Reade exemplified, and for which Burnand and Punch 
caricatured him. The truth seems to be that the abuse of 
the startling incident as a means of closing the instalment 
was peculiarly a writer's device elaborated as the easiest 
and readiest way to meet such requirements of form as 
Dickens, in common with other writers of serial fiction, 
generally demanded. As a constant writer of instalment 
novels from the time of Oliver TwisVs appearance in Bentley^s 
Miscellany, he is clearly one of the chief contributors to the 
method; but his own theories and his practice by no means 
accord with the reviewer's generalization. The habit of 
leaving hero or heroine for a week or a month in a situation 
of the utmost peril was developed during the sixties by less 
notable serialists than Dickens. 

When we turn to the serials of Reade and Collins the 
matter seems somewhat altered. Roughly speaking, instal- 
ment fiction for miscellanies during the fifties and sixties 



86 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

had to be adapted in tone and value of material as well as 
in length of unit of publication to the magazine for which 
it was designed. The unit for publication of a twenty-part 
pamphlet novel differed from that for Blackwood's or The 
Cornhill in length. The unit for All the Year Round differed 
from both. The shilling pamphlet novel required about 
two sheets for an instalment; The Cornhill required one or 
a little more; All the Year Round from 4000 to 6000 words, 
or rather less than half a sheet. In the longer units of The 
Cornhill the stories of Reade and Collins were studiously 
arranged in '^chmax and curtain" portions. Take, for 
example, Put Yourself in his Place in The Cornhill. Number 
one sets forth the position of Henry Little as an independent 
workman in the shops, and stresses the enmity between him 
and the trades unions. It comes to an end with the illiterate 
threat against his life signed sliper Jack. The second instal- 
ment, which carries on the same thread, concludes with the 
explosion of Little's forge and his sensational escape from 
death. The third and fourth parts vary the procedure; the 
story turns to the hero's love affairs. The third ends with 
a big typed exhortation to Little from Mr. Garden to have 
his life insured. The fifth concludes with the heroine's 
falling against the door of Little's secret forge in the old 
Cairnhope church, quite exhausted by exposure in a snow- 
storm. At the end of the sixth number, Coventry, Henry's 
rival and the villain of the piece, who was also lost in the 
snow, finally succeeds in reaching the church, where he dis- 
covers Henry and the girl in a very lover-like attitude. 
The eighth concludes with the union enemies of Little stand- 
ing without the door of his secret forge ready to enter and 
take their vengeance. Out of fifteen instances where such 
a conclusion is conceivably possible, Reade employs it ten 
times. In eight of the ten he manages to bring into jeopardy 
the life of hero or heroine; murder, gunpowder, and ex- 



THE BACKGROUND OF SENSATIONALISM 87 

posure are among the agents employed for this purpose in 
the first five numbers; attempted murder twice more, and 
a flood which washes away whole villages are among the 
remaining agencies. 

Collins and Reade, especially the latter, had carried this 
scheme so far as to rely very generally upon what is known 
in the drama as ''curtain lines." Of the early instalments 
of Armadale in The Cornhill, which are devised in this climax 
curtain manner, the second concludes — ''Read that, and 
for Christ's sake pity me when you know who I am!" The 
following one: "'The boat; the boat,' he cried in a scream 
of horror. The boat was adrift." In No Name as printed in 
All the Year Round four successive numbers conclude as 
follows: (1) At a low ebb of her fortunes the heroine is in 
her own room. In her hands she holds two phials. The 
second of these "held a dark liquid, and it was labeled — 
Poison." (2) The heroine, being unable to resolve upon 
suicide, leaves her fate to chance. She sits by a casement 
which marks a line upon the ocean in the foreground. She 
decides to give herself half an hour. If during that time 
an odd number of vessels pass the line of her vision she 
drinks the poison; if an even number, she lives. Chance 
decides that she is to live, and the number ends when she 
falls asleep. (3) "What I have now to say to you must be 
heard by no living creature." (4) "He went to the table 
to rouse him. Was he deep in thought? He was dead!" 
Reade's narrative in Hard Cash, a story especially written 
for periodical consumption, abounds unusually in the same 
devices. The Agra, commanded by Captain Dodd, is bring- 
ing home £14,000, the hard cash for which the story is named, 
to his wife and children. He has just fought off two pirate 
ships when he meets a mischance. (1) "The captain of the 
triumphant ship fell down on his hands and knees, his head 
sunk over the gangway, and his blood ran fast and pattered 



88 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

in the midst of them on the deck he had so bravely defended." 
(2) At the end of the next number comes the attempt of 
an oriental servant to murder the sick captain. ''The 
surgeon was not there; the two blacks, one with a knife 
and one with his bare claws were fighting and struggling, 
trampling all over the cabin at once, and the dying man 
sitting upon his cot, pale and glaring at them." (3) At 
the end of the next number Captain Dodd discovers that he 
has lost the pocket-book containing the hard cash. (4) The 
Agra encounters a fearful tropical storm; ''A voice in the 
dark cried — 'Oh God! we are dead men!'" 

On the evidence of the serials in All the Year Round this 
constant arrangement of climax and curtain at short inter- 
vals is really representative of Reade's method only. It is 
one of his obsessions. Great Expectations, A Tale of Two 
Cities, The Woman in White, and No Name reveal no tend- 
ency unduly to rely upon this stage trick, though all lend 
themselves readily enough to such arrangement. It seems 
a pretty certain conclusion that, as contrasted with Reade, 
Collins and Dickens were fond of longer periods of suspense, 
and of more varied expedients to retain interest. They 
slowly built up and elaborated their climaxes with a copious- 
ness of detail and of rhetorical dalliance that Reade rejected 
altogether. Dickens, for instance, at the beginning of A Tale 
of Two Cities, projects the reader forward by repetition of 
blindly mysterious phrases — buried alive and recalled to 
life. From one of Dickens's letters it appears that Collins 
did not approve this procedure. He usually preferred a 
mystery which is an intellectual puzzle, not a pure mys- 
tification. In Dickens's story he urged that some significant 
clues be thrown out; but the master, on the contrary, went 
on through half a dozen numbers, rolling back bit by bit 
the terrible story of Dr. Manette without intimating at all 
clearly its significance or even its nature. But two or three 



THE BACKGROUND OF SENSATIONALISM 89 

examples of Readers favorite climax and quick curtain scene 
appear from first to last. Dickens and Collins both might 
have subscribed to Besant's dictum; they did not under- 
stand an incident an obligatory close for the instalment even 
of a sensation story. In fact, they seem to have been of the 
opinion that melodramatic incidents were most effective 
when not crowded very closely together. The real secret 
of instalment writing was suspense; in this the incident is 
only one means — and one of the crudest — of achieving 
the end. The emphasis of CoUins's famous formula for 
popular fiction is significant — ''Make 'em laugh; make 
'em cry; make 'em wait." 

Indeed that the stories of this trio would have differed 
essentially in their treatment of incident — that startling 
climaxes would have been much less abundant — had they 
not been serialists at all is by no means certain. The indica- 
tions of this may best be seen in Reade, whose Peg Woffington 
and Never too Late to Mend were not used for periodicals. 
The portion of the latter story dealing with the gold fields 
of Australia, which Reade had utilized in one of his earliest 
successful plays, reveals the dependence upon the same 
narrative expedient noted in Hard Cash or Put Yourself iii 
his Place, No sooner have Fielding and Robinson been 
successful in their digging than their profits beget dangerous 
conspiracies among the less fortunate. The first plot against 
them comes to a head thus: the thief is stealing upon their 
tent in the darkness, pistol in hand, a knife between his 
teeth. ''His hand is inside the tent — he finds the opening, 
and winds like a serpent into the tent." In the next chapter 
the thief is apprehended and dealt with according to camp 
law. Another conspiracy is set afoot by their especial enemy, 
Crawley, who is too much a coward to venture himself into 
danger. His henchmen have a wholesome fear of the rough 
and ready Judge Lynch also. In urging them on, Crawley 



90 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

insists that they have suffered nothing terrible heretofore. 
One ruffian especially, so Crawley urges, has had no mark 
set upon him by their enemies. '''Haven't they?' yelled 
the man, with a tremendous oath. 'Look here!' A glance 
was enough. Crawley turned wan and shuddered from head 
to foot." In the next Robinson and George Fielding set 
out from the mining camp in search of their mysterious 
enemy. When they learn that they are being followed, 
Robinson decides to turn the tables. Doubling on the trail, 
he gets his revolver ready and enforces silence upon his com- 
panion. At George's query what all this means, ''/ am 
hunting the hunted,^ ^ hissed Robinson with concentrated 
fury. And he glided down the trodden path, "his revolver 
cocked, his ears pricked, his eye on fire, and his teeth 
clenched." Omitting a chapter or two w^e come to the fight 
between the robbers and the miners. One chapter here 
ends with Crawley's dramatic discovery that he has a tail. 
Jacky the native has speared him in the fight; and the 
terror produced by this almost brings on the tremens. In 
the next the Australian scenes close with Crawley's dramatic 
discovery that his prey has escaped. Fielding and his gold 
are aboard a ship which Crawley discovers in the offing. 
''The steamer cast off and came wheeling back; the ship 
spread her white plumage, and went proudly off to sea, the 
blue waves breaking white under her bow. Crawley sat 
staring at all this in a state of mental collapse." 

Now it may be granted that in Reade the accentuation 
of the melodramatic ending is slightly more shrill if possible 
and slightly more frequent in Hard Cashj Foul Play, and 
Put Yourself, which were written according to the novelist 
himself for serial production. That this accident in publish- 
ing accented their sensational devices somewhat is indubi- 
table; but that magazine writing and periodical pubh cation 
produced the devices can by no means be granted. Serial 



THE BACKGROUND OF SENSATIONALISM 91 

publication was only an accident in the sensationalism of 
Dickens and his ablest followers. It is significant that the 
portion of Never too Late which just served as an illustration 
of Reade's consistently sensational handling of his incident 
throughout his career was first utilized in his drama Gold. 
These sensationalists certainly studied all means to stimu- 
late interest in their stories as serials; but their sensa- 
tionalism had far deeper causes than any produced by an 
accidental form of publication. Behind it lay their literary 
creed — the unanimous belief in the three that as the play 
is spoken drama, so the novel should be written drama. Both 
the form of publishing and their literary dogma tended in 
the same sensational direction. Any attempt to distinguish 
sharply between the effects of these two can hardly fail to 
produce much that is mistaken and misleading. 

6. Novelist and Public 

Novels and novelists entered the nineteenth century with 
no very enviable reputation. Literary society in general 
was inclined to look askance at prose fiction, and plain folk 
of no pretensions to cultivation in letters regarded it as 
little short of diabolical. The elder Blackwood, as the stoiy 
goes, once took home to his aged mother a story by Gait. 
The old lady found the book diverting enough until her son 
inadvertently mentioned that it was a novel. Thereafter 
nothing could persuade her to read another page. Mrs. 
Oliphant relates that in her early girlhood she asked at the 
circulating library for a copy of Bulwer's Eugene Maltravers. 
The librarian, an elderly and severe spinster, was astounded 
at the perversity of her taste and stubbornly insisted upon 
substituting an ''improving book." Scott, who more than 
any other except Dickens was responsible for the vogue of 
the novel, said flatly in the preface to The Abbot that he did 
not consider the novelist as ''standing high in the ranks of 



92 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

imaginative literature." A similar opinion accounts for the 
nominal anonymity of Man of Feeling Mackenzie, and has 
more to do than perhaps has been recognized with Scott's 
mystification as to the authorship of Waverley. To one of 
the two friends to whom he voluntarily confided the secret, 
he expressed doubts whether or not a man in his position 
could decorously acknowledge himself a writer of fiction. 
The reviewers of the new journalism which came into being 
with the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews reveal the same 
prejudice. Contemporary notices of Lady Morgan's novels 
and of Maturin's indicate that the reviewers expected fiction 
to be more or less trivial or absurd, and made blunderingly 
sturdy efforts to find it so regardless. Indeed they often 
apologized with a very annoying condescension for noticing 
such books at all. 

For this disrepute the noveUsts themselves were partly 
responsible. Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne had left a 
tradition of grossness which new times and new manners 
made obnoxious. The new romance for which Mrs. Radcliffe 
won approbation hardly recovered from the opprobrium 
which Lewis's Monk brought upon it. Not even the pro- 
priety of Mrs. Radcliffe, which made feeling for bold scenery 
a criterion of character, or the soUd basis of thought in 
St. Leon could quite redeem it. Despite Scott, romance suc- 
ceeded very tolerably by one vagary and another in retain- 
ing the flavor of disrepute. Byron's influence led directly 
to the Newgate novel of the thirties, in which the Gothic 
monster is but scotched. The realism of Maria Edge worth 
and Jane Austen, though well received by the few, was quite 
destitute of the big bow wow. Thus romance was handi- 
capped by popular prejudice, by the pedantry of review^ers, 
and by the vagaries of its producers themselves. This was 
by no means all. The increase in the reading public com- 
bined with a reform in national manners led to almost in- 



THE BACKGROUND OF SENSATIONALISM 93 

credible smugness and prudery. Respectability in the odious 
sense of Victorian times became rampant. So far as fiction 
is concerned respectability meant that if certain topics 
could be kept out of consideration all would be well with its 
health; vice and misery were vulgar ; telling the plain truth, 
drawing a man as he is, Thackeray said, drove subscribers 
away. 

For all this in the criticism of the thirties and forties 
there is some excuse. Behind it are the fear of a rowdy and 
unclean press and serious concern for English institutions 
and society. The novelist's struggle for freedom of utterance 
and of theme, for acceptance as a serious commentator upon 
life as he saw it, was a bitter one. As Dr. Downward, in 
Wilkie Collins's Armadale, has it, the novelist was expected 
only to amuse his readers, and occasionally to make them 
laugh. If he chose to picture the misery of London, he was 
vulgar; if he delineated to his utmost a man, the tongues 
of good ladies in their homes and in the reviewers' offices 
became shrill. If he chose, Uke Bulwer in Paul Clifford, to 
expound the workings of a brutal criminal law, he had to 
shirk vital details of his demonstration; and if he touched 
upon illicit love, as Oliver Twist did, he had to drape his 
Nancy in a speech as foreign to her as Mrs. Malaprop's is to 
sense. Nothing can be more enlightening, as to the temper 
of Victorian criticism and public, than Ruskin's "exception 
with honor" of Oliver Twist ''from the loathsome mass to 
which it belongs." ''This loathsome mass" includes among 
others specifically Bleak House, Barnahy Rudge, The Hunch- 
back of Notre Dame, and Wilkie Collins 's Poor Miss Finch. ^ 
No noveUst, not even Scott, escaped the prudery which would 
have limited Victorian novels to subject matter appropriate 
to the best regulated Sunday school library. Modern letters 

* "Fiction Fair and Foul." The Nineteenth Century, vol. 7, pp. 
948-949. 



94 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

afford few spectacles more grotesquely humorous than that 
of critical nonentities of now defunct journals reprehending 
Walter Scott and Thackeray on grounds of public morality. 
This prudery was by no means restricted to the well-meaning 
hacks who criticized novels according to the standards of 
religious cults or of acidulous maiden ladies. It extended 
up the scale to Edinburgh and Quarterly. Representatively 
enough, Jeffrey, in collecting his essays on literature at the 
end of his career, insists upon his efforts to preserve morality 
as his prime claim to remembrance. 

The vagaries perpetrated in the interests of this morality 
by those who should have known better are often all but 
incredible. In St. Ronan^s Well, according to Lockhart, 
good James Ballantyne objected to the mischance which 
explains Clara's shattered mind. Jeffrey is responsible for 
obscuration of the intrigue in Domhey and Son between 
Mrs. Dombey and Mr. Carker. Dickens intended that 
Edith should be the mistress; but the objection of the critic, 
heeded with no happy result, imposed upon the story a 
situation which is neither convincing nor even quite intelli- 
gible. Dr. Arnold preached a sermon against the monthly 
numbers of Nicholas Nickleby. Trollope relates that a 
certain McLeod, the editor of Good Words, was much per- 
turbed because Rachel Ray, which the novelist was con- 
tributing as a serial to that journal, dealt approvingly with 
dancing. 

There is nothing odd really then in the fact that Thackeray, 
who had done fiction excellent service as a contributor to 
Eraser's in driving the Newgate romance out of fashion, 
should have been long spitefully attacked for want of re- 
hgion and morality. Among women at least it was only 
the exceptional reader, like Charlotte Bronte or Mrs. Carlyle, 
who openly and unequivocally admired Vanity Fair and 
Pendennis. Harriet Martineau thought that 'Hhe first 



THE BACKGROUND OF SENSATIONALISM 95 

drawback in his books, as in his manners, is the impression 
that he never can have known a good and a sensible woman. '^ 
Mrs. Jameson dehvers a diatribe on Lady Castlewood thus: 
'' The virtuous woman par excellence who never sins and never 
forgives; who never resents, nor relents, nor repents; the 
mother who is the rival of her daughter; the mother who is 
the confidante of a man's delirious passion for her own child, 
and then consoles him by marrying him herself." How 
Thackeray chafed under such prudery and rule of thumb 
morality the preface to Pendennis testifies; and no matter 
how familiar it may be, no truer indictment of the half- 
cultivated bourgeois audience that paid for and restrained 
fiction two generations ago was ever written. ''Since the 
author of Tom Jones was buried no writer of fiction among 
us has been permitted to depict to his utmost power a man. 
We must drape him and give him a conventional simper. 
Society will not tolerate the natural in our art. Many 
ladies have remonstrated and subscribers left me because 
in the course of the story, I described a young man resisting 
and affected by temptation. My object was to say he had 
passions to feel and the manliness and generosity to overcome 
them. You will not hear — it is best not to know it — what 
moves in the real world; what passes in society; in the 
clubs, colleges, mess-rooms — what is the life and talk of 
your sons. A little more frankness than is customary has 
been attempted in this story, with no bad desire on the 
writer's part, and with no ill consequence to the reader. If 
the truth is not always pleasant, at any rate the truth is 
best from whatever chair — from those whence grave writers 
and thinkers argue, as from those at which the story-teller 
sits as he concludes his labors and bids his kind readers 
farewell." 

Thackeray knew well enough the recipe for success, if 
his regard for truth had permitted him to use it. ''You 



96 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

would have the heroine of your novel so beautiful that she 
would charm the hero with her appearance; surprise and 
confound the bishop with her learning, outride the squire 
and get the brush; and when he fell, whip out a lancet and 
bleed him; rescue from fever and death the poor cottagers 
the physician had given up; make twenty -one at the butts 
when the poor captain scored only eighteen ; give him twenty 
at fifty in billiards and beat him; and draw tears from the 
professional Italian people by her exquisite performance (of 
voice or violincello) in the evening — I say that if the 
novelist would be popular with the ladies — the great novel 
readers of the world — this is the sort of heroine who would 
carry him through half a dozen editions." Hampered thus 
by a public which shrank from frank presentation of the 
truth, yet found keen delight in Rookwood and Eugene Aram 
during the thirties, or in Lady Audley and Strathmore 
during the sixties, it is not strange that Thackeray waited 
long to be heard, or that there is much bitterness in Codlingshy 
or George de Barnwell. 

Yet essentially underneath this superficial manifestation 
of taste which results from the enfranchisement of the 
many, it was a period of growing liberalism. The decade 
preceding Oliver Twist had been marked by Catholic emanci- 
pation, the first Reform Bill, and the achievement of good 
cheap reading matter by the Society for the Diffusion of 
Useful Knowledge. When the Reform Bill of 1832 gave 
redress to the middle classes, however, it still left the plight 
of the laborers desperate. Poor laws that encouraged 
pauperdom, protection of agriculture which artificially 
maintained the high price of corn, intolerably long working 
hours in mines and factories, and squalid, overcrowded 
living quarters in the manufacturing cities called for imme- 
diate and drastic action. With reformatory zeal which 
characterized men of heart, a group of young novelists seized 



THE BACKGROUND OF SENSATIONALISM 97 

upon fiction as a means of influencing reform; and from 
1844 or 1845 onward for ten years produced a body of 
fiction which seems to have contributed to a bolder and more 
downright method of narrative. Bulwer had set the prece- 
dent with Paul Clifford in 1830. DisraeU in Coningshy, Sybil, 
and Tancred set forth his conception of Young England; 
Kingsley in Yeast and Alton Locke hastily flung into story 
form first-hand studies of conditions in agriculture and in 
the London sweat shops. Mrs. Gaskell in Mary Barton 
and North and South and Dickens in Hard Times contributed 
realistic reformatory tales of the manufacturing cities. 

The peculiar contribution of the utilitarian romance was 
in method. As has been illustrated in Ruskin's comment 
upon Dickens, a professed moral purpose went far in these 
days; in these reformatory stories, for instance, it justified 
calling a spade by its right name. At the same time that 
Thackeray was urging of Becky, Jos. and Lord Steyne 
*'such people there are, dear reader — let us have them with 
might and main," Disraeli in Sybil and Kingsley in Yeast 
and Alton Locke were employing a deliberately naked and 
gruesome truth of incident, detail, and character to shock 
the public into active interest for the workers. The passages 
of Alton Locke that remain longest in the memory are the 
excursion of Sandy, the old Scotch bookseller, with the 
hero through the garrets of London in search for vital 
subjects for Alton's muse, and the death of Jeemie Downs, 
the wretched tailor. But the startling literalness of these 
scenes did not exist for its own sake, nor were the novelists 
even so quite at ease as to its reception. Kingsley is openly 
apologetic for it, pleading his purpose as excuse; and Dis- 
raeli in Sybil declares that he did not make the terrible 
sketch of the weaver Warner's family as terrible as the reality. 
It was, therefore, only a question of time when novelists 
should enforce their right to employ this literal truth-speaking 



98 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

at discretion. No Victorians were more insistent for a liberal 
construction of their art than the Dickens group. As Dickens 
and Collins once put it, they were ''serious minds with serious 
objects," esteeming themselves not only entertainers but 
leaders and makers of popular opinion. Their sensationalism 
was seriously applied to questions of widespread interest 
in contemporary life — to cheap schools in Nicholas Nicklehy, 
to laws relating to marriage in No Name, to labor unions 
in Put Yourself in his Place. Their belief in "pubhcity" 
was unbounded, and they accordingly not only made an 
avowedly popular appeal, but prided themselves upon 
doing so. 

This attitude is apparent in all that they did. Dickens 
entered upon periodical-making to gain profits that under 
the older system found their way to the pubhsher's pockets, 
but remained to conduct two model cheap papers. When 
he printed the words "Conducted by Charles Dickens" at 
the top of his sheet, he understood himself to be pledging 
a personal reputation upon the quality of Household Words 
or All the Year Round. How badly merit such as he could 
command was needed in the cheap press that had sprung 
up before mid-century, and how middle-class society felt 
about that press may be gathered from a study of Thackeray's 
in Eraser's for March, 1838. This article, bearing the title 
Half a Crown's Worth of Cheap Knowledge, is a description of 
fifteen current cheap journals, and a criticism by implication 
at least of The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowl- 
edge. Thackeray brought The Poor Man's Friend, Liversay's 
Moral Reformer, The Wars of Europe, The Penny Story- 
teller, The Sporting Gazette, The Sporting World, Oliver 
Twiss by Boz, The Weekly Magazine, The Fly, The Penny 
Age, The Penny Satirist, Cleave's Penny Gazette, The London 
Satirist, The Star of Venus or The Show-up Chronicle, and 
The Town. His comment upon this nondescript assemblage 



THE BACKGROUND OF SENSATIONALISM 99 

is not more lugubrious than that of most other conservatives. 
"The school master is abroad and the prejudices of the people 
disappear. Where we had one scoundrel we may count 
them now by the hundred of thousands. We have our penny 
libraries for debauchery as for other useful knowledge, and 
colleges, like palaces, for study — gin palaces where each 
starving Sardanapalus may revel until he die." These were 
not mere empty expressions that Dickens wrote in foreword 
to Household Words: ''There are some already in the field 
before us, panders to the basest passions of the lowest 
natures, whose existence is a national reproach, and these 
we should consider it our highest service to displace." The 
same seriousness appears in a letter ^ by Reade to one of the 
correspondents stirred up by It is Never too Late to Mend, 
the novel in which Reade applied the sensational method to 
prison regimen. ''Those black facts (inhuman governors 
and fatally brutal methods of discipline) have been before 
the public before I ever handled them; they have been told, 
and tolerably well told, by many chroniclers. But it is my 
business, my art, and my duty to make you ladies and 
gentlemen realize things which the chronicler presents to 
you in his dim, stolid, and shadowy way; and so they pass 
over your mind like idle wind." Or again he retorted with 
characteristic vehemence to a critic of his handling of trade 
unions in Put Yourself in his Place that he was, in his small 
way, a public benefactor. Whoever calls the author of that 
story a criminal "is a liar and a scoundrel." 

The Dickens group were not, therefore, altogether in 
sympathy with the current methods of "improving the 
masses." Mutual improvement societies, lectures, informa- 
tional reading matter which quite ignored appeals to fancy 
seemed to them very unlikely to achieve the purpose. The 
masses themselves never resented more hotly the solemn 

* Memoir of Charles Reade, p. 244. 



100 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

seriousness and the patronage in most of these attempts. 
Dickens defines his notions of serviceabiHty in Ught Htera- 
ture in the first number of Household Words. ''To show all, 
that in all familiar things, even in those which are repellent 
on the surface, there is Romance enough, if we will but find 
it out — to teach the hardest workers at this whirling wheel 
of toil that their lot is not necessarily a moody, brutal fact 
excluded from the sympathies and graces of imagination; 
to bring the greater and lesser, in a degree, together upon 
that wide field and mutually dispose them to a better 
acquaintance and a kindlier understanding — is one main 
object of our Household Words.^' ^ Again, Dickens, re- 
proached by Charles Knight for throwing his powerful influ- 
ence upon the side of fiction rather than that of useful 
knowledge, retorted: ''The English are, so far as I know, 
the hardest worked people on whom the sun shines. Be 
content if in their wretched intervals of leisure they read 
for amusement and do no worse. They are born at the oar, 

they live and die at it. Good God, what would we have of 
them!" 2 

In similar vein Reade declared novels to be "the only 
cheap yet ravishing delight the world affords." ColHns 
also deprecated the solemnity and heaviness of current 
methods of enlightening the public. In Chapter 6 of A 
Rogue^s Life he breaks out characteristically: "My unhappy 
countrymen! (and thrice unhappy they of the poorer sort) 
— any man can preach to them, lecture them, and form them 
into classes; but where is the man who can get them to 
amuse themselves? Anybody may cram their poor heads; 
but who will lighten their grave faces? Don't read story 
books, don't go to plays, don't dance! Finish your long 
day's work and then intoxicate your minds with solid history, 

^ Foreword to first issue, March 30, 1850. 

2 Passages of a Working Life. Knight's reissue, vol, 3, pp. 16, 17. 



THE BACKGROUND OF SENSATIONALISM 101 

revel in the too attractive luxury of the lecture room, sink 
under the soft temptation of classes for mutual instruction. 
How many potent, grave, and reverend tongues discourse 
to the popular ear in these siren times, and how resignedly 
this same popular ear listens. What if a bold man spring 
up one day crying aloud in this wilderness : Play, for Heaven's 
sake, or you will work yourself into a nation of automatons. 
Shake a loose leg to a lively fiddle. Women of England! 
drag the lecturer off the rostrum, the male mutual instructor 
out of his class, and ease their poor addled heads of evenings 
by making them dance and sing with you. Accept no offer 
from any man who cannot be proved for a year past to have 
lost his dignity at least three times a week after office hours. 
You, daughters of Eve, who have that wholesome love of 
pleasure which is one of the greatest adornments of the 
female character, set up a society for the promotion of uni- 
versal amusement, and save the British nation from the 
lamentable social consequences of our own gravity. Imagine 
a voice crying lustily after this fashion. What sort of echoes 
would he find? Groans." 

Obviously men who talk thus about romance and amuse- 
ment consider themselves something more than idle singers 
of an empty day. Romance is a serious business ; inevitably 
their sensationalism thus seriously applied brought them 
into frequent conflict with critics and conservative public. 
Thackeray listed Oliver Twist among the Newgate novels 
of Bulwer and Ainsworth; Ruskin cited Barnaby Rudge, 
Bleak House, and Nicholas Nickleby as foul fiction. Trol- 
lope, quite representatively of a large part of the public, 
thought that Reade's reformatory novels exaggerated and 
falsified the objects of attack. Two continents bawled car- 
rion at Griffith Gaunt and A Terrible Temptation; The Quar- 
terly slated No Name, the first onslaught by Collins on 
marriage laws, as belonging to the same category with The 



102 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

Last Days of a Bachelor and Pages from the Life of a Fast 
Young Lady; The Athenaeum in 1866 noticed Armadale 
and Ouida's Chandos in a blanket review without finding 
essential difference between them in purpose or merit. 
That the novelists retorted upon such criticism acrimoni- 
ously is only human nature. The replies themselves will 
serve to define more clearly the general attitude of the 
Dickensians toward the art and purpose of fiction-making 
and toward the public. 

The first of these onslaughts was a joint essay by Dickens 
and Collins entitled Dr. Dulcamara M.P. which was printed 
as a leading article in Household Words, December 18, 1858. 
The Right Honorable Sidney Herbert on the Hustings had 
ventured into criticism of fiction with a eulogy of domestic 
novels which he extolled at the expense of the dramatic 
and tragic varieties. He had quoted Guizot in comparing 
English and French novels as follows: ''In science we match 
you; in poetry we match you . . .; in history we match 
you; but we have not got anything in our literature like 
The Heir of Redely ffe and your domestic novels. All books 
of that class are peculiarly English. They are books describ- 
ing a virtuous domestic life — books describing a simple 
domestic life. They do not go to the tragic or dramatic 
for interest, but they draw it from the simple springs of 
natural life. This we have not got in the literature of 
France." This implied derogation of the sensational and 
the tragic stirred a contemptuous wrath in the office of 
Household Words. Protesting that their "previous want of 
acquaintance with this Pusey-novel arose from no barba- 
rous indifference to the important literary events of our age 
and country," but from fear of reading so affecting a story 
as they have observed Miss Yonge's to be, Dickens and 
Collins proceed to ridicule The Heir of Redclyffe on the 
grounds that its characters "have no types in nature, 



THE BACKGROUND OF SENSATIONALISM 103 

never did have types in nature ; and never will have types in 
nature." They poke very heavy-handed fun at the hero's 
flaring up at a light remark about King Charles I, which 
''rouses the lion in him" and sets "his hazel eye gleaming 
like an eagle's." They revolt from the subjection of the 
art of narrative to the ideals of a particular religious cult. 
No, they conclude, "France will have no such book as this 
until she has the two classes which such a book addresses. 
The first class, a large and wealthy section of the so-called 
reUgious world, which looks to the obtrusively professed 
intention of a book solely, and knows and cares nothing 
about the execution; the second class represented by a 
body of romantic young ladies whose ideal man (name and 
all) is exactly represented by such a character as Sir Guy 
Morville." Let the Sidney Herberts and the Guizots go 
about addressing athenaeums, and "let the Athenaeums 
take their physic, if they like it and feel better for it; but 
leit them be held at a distance by earnest men with definite 
objects before earnest minds, and those objects tending — 
not to the retrogression of their country into the dark ages, 
but to its advancement in the plain road that opened eighteen 
hundred and fifty-eight years ago." 

The limitations which "respectable" folk would impose 
upon the art of fiction is treated with a defter touch in 
A Petition to Novel Readers by Collins alone. ^ The satire is 
based on the Spectator expedient of a letter to the editor 
purporting to be written by a romantic gentleman who 
resides in the country where he reads fiction inveterately. 
The romantic gentleman has just disrupted the provincial 
literary society to which he had belonged by the introduc- 
tion of a novel in place of the customaiy books of travel and 
of improving knowledge. The novel had almost produced 
a riot; one member objected that the author was a pantheist; 
^ Reprinted in Mij Miscellanies. 



104 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

and though nobody seemed to know what a pantheist is, 
the members cried hear! hear! ''which did just as well for 
the purpose." Another gentleman said the book was pain- 
ful because there was a death bed scene in it. The knell of 
fiction, however, was rung by the mother of ''a large family, 
whose oldest was a girl of eighteen and whose youngest a 
boy of eight months, who objected that in the course of the 
three volumes, the heroine had two accouchements. . . . 

How can I suffer my daughter to read such a book as that? ' 
cried our prolific subscriber indignantly. A tumult of 
applause followed. A chorus of speeches succeeded, full of 
fierce reference to our national morality, and the purity of 
our hearths and homes.'* Finally a resolution was passed 
that novels be excluded from the club. The romantic gentle- 
man, for his part, has decided to take an unlimited subscrip- 
tion to a London circulating library and have down a box 
of novels every month. But he and his family have quite 
lost caste in their community. ''If the dull people of our 
district were told to-morrow that my wife and daughters 
had all eloped in different directions, leaving just one point 
of the compass open as an outlet for me and the cook, I feel 
firmly persuaded that not one of them would be inclined to 
discredit the report. 'This is what comes of novel-reading,' 
they would say, and would return, with renewed zest, to 
their voyages and travels, their accouchements in real life, 
their canting national morality, and their blustering purity 
of our hearths and homes." 

Readers Griffith Gaunt in 1866, and A Terrible Temptation^ 
six years later, involved him in a quarrel as to the novelist's 
scope with the public of two continents. The first of these 
stories was built upon the typical "sensation" motives, 
bigamy and murder; the second, upon a family feud and the 
desire of a reformed rake for a son and heir. In the early 
chapters of A Terrible Temptation there is an amusing enough 



THE BACKGROUND OF SENSATIONALISM 105 

sketch of the wiles of Rhoda Somerset, then the kept mis- 
tress of one of the leading characters. The sketch was 
scornful and masculinely humorous enough, one would 
think, to have escaped the strictures of Mrs. Gnmdy, but 
The Times, nevertheless, complained that the tale dealt 
with things the novelist had no business to present, and 
even hinted that wise mothers would do well to keep ''the 
first volume from their unmarried daughters." Reade re- 
torted that The Times itself had given him the idea for 
Rhoda. The Times representatives unwisely tried to escape 
this awkward rejoinder by the argument that theirs were 
public duties, whereas Mr. Reade's were private. ''Why," 
roars Reade, "my English circulation is larger than that of 
The Times; and in the United States three publishers have 
sold 370,000 copies of this novel — which, I take it, is about 
thirty times the circulation of The Times in the United States, 
and nearly six times its English circulation." As the novelist 
sees it — "Journals must of necessity report in their small 
type some crimes and vices quite unfit to be mentioned in 
a novel; but that a journalist has any right to put in his 
leaded type and to amplify and discuss, and dwell upon 
any subject whatever, and that the poet and the novelist 
has not an equal right to deal with that subject in fiction — 
this is monstrous and the mere delusion of rabid egotism." 

"Since, therefore, I have taken anonyma from your hands 
and have presented her in no voluptuous scenes, and have 
made her a repulsive character until she repents, no mother 
need forbid my book to her daughter; at all events until 
she has forbidden her daughter to enter Hyde Park, and 
The Times to enter her drawing room, and has locked up 
every Bible on her premises." 

As courageously as Thackeray they too believed that the 
truth is best ; and for "the clap trap morality of the present," 
as Collins describes it in the preface to Armadale, they had 



106 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

the bitterest contempt. This contempt grows out of the 
seriousness with which they took themselves and their 
art. It is significant that in the letters exchanged between 
them are many references to "the art," ''our art," and that 
they describe themselves over and over as brothers in it. 
But their truth was not the humdrum truth of everyday 
experience. Based, as we shall see, upon attested fact, it 
deliberately chose for representation the unfamiliar and 
sensational manifestation. Whether this highly serious 
sensationalism in its characteristic application to local and 
temporary conditions — to divorce laws, prison reform, and 
the Court of Chancery — was beneficial to their fame sub- 
sequently may be doubted. Not to students and critics 
only, but to readers generally the burden of specific purpose 
appears to have spoiled the flavor of brilliant work. One 
and all are best remembered now for tales that had no 
thesis — Dickens for David Copperfield and Great Expecta- 
tions, Reade for Peg Woffington, Christie Johnstone, and The 
Cloister and the Hearth, Collins for The Woman in White 
and The Moonstone. Such at least is the almost invariable 
testimony of the libraries of cheap reprints. Still the reso- 
lute fight for a liberal construction of their art in a prudish 
society, growing out of an earnest devotion to it and an 
effort to make it more than others made theirs a powerful 
and immediate influence upon the life of the time, contrasts 
favorably with the frank commercialism of Trollope or the 
frequent dubiety of Thackeray toward his chosen profession. 
Theirs is not the confidence of conceit, but that of men who 
see a work to be done and feel a certainty of their ability 
and election to perform it. 

Summary 

In about thirty-five years from the date of Constable's 
11-fated Miscellany, the old order had ended and the new 



THE BACKGROUND OF SENSATIONALISM 107 

was established. Pamphlet novel, cheap miscellany, and 
circulating library had forced down the price of fiction, 
though the reactionary custom of publishing in three volumes 
operated to preserve an unconscionable length. When at 
last paper taxes were reduced, cheap journals became 
increasingly numerous. These cheap journals, upon which 
the taste of the time forced the serial novel, particularly 
affected the sensational serial, and gave it a new and dis- 
tinctive narrative method. From this trade turmoil and 
change the novelist emerged the great literary wage earner. 
He found himself no longer a sort of pariah of letters, but 
the favorite entertainer and teacher. Under these circum- 
stances he demands the right to become a serious critic of 
life. His newborn dignities, however, he bears a little 
uneasily; but knowing the public, not the bookseller, to 
be the arbiter of his fate, to the public directly he appeals. 

Such is the background for the work of the Dickensians 
as exploiters of fiction. In a sense, of course, it is the back- 
ground for the Victorian novel generally — for Thackeray, 
Trollope, and George Eliot as well as for Dickens, Collins, 
and Reade; but not by any means in the same degree. The 
domestic was high-brow fiction; the sensational of the 
Dickensians avowedly popular. With one exception no 
serial written by one of them appeared in a magazine which 
sold for more than a shilling. There is not, moreover, one 
of these notable changes affecting novels — lower prices, 
promotion of cheap magazines, increased wage for novelist, 
the struggle of the story-teller for acceptance as a serious 
commentator upon life — in which Dickens did not engage; 
none in which he did not exert an influence as powerful as 
that of any man of letters of his time. 

Not since the Puritans closed the theaters had public 
and men of letters been so intimate. Indeed the great 
epoch of the drama and the great epoch of the novel are 



108 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

roughly analogous. Under similar conditions of direct 
appeal of writer to audience there arise similar products; 
for just as direct appeal in the EUzabethan theater called 
out the tragedy of blood which Hamlet or The White Devil 
glorified, so here among the Victorians it gave vogue to 
the sensationalism which Great Expectations and The Moon- 
stone rendered memorable. The heel of the buskin has 
been perceptibly lowered; but one can no more fail to 
recognize that sensationalism represents a halfway station 
between the tragedy of blood and the moving picture, than 
that both grow out of the direct communication of story- 
teller and story buyer. Above all, both are democratic 
art. Trade phenomena alone, of course, do not explain 
completely the sensationalism of the Dickens group. Be- 
yond local and temporary conditions of trade and of public 
are further matters of temperament and of literary tradition 
— of innate love for the theatrical whether behind the 
footlights or between the covers of a novel. But trade 
conditions are clearly an essential reason why they are in 
one breath makers of incredible melodrama and officious 
moralists. It was their interest in and conformance to 
these new conditions, both as men of business and as men 
of letters, that constitute their especial title to recognition 
as the democrats of the Victorian novel. 



CHAPTER III 
THE SCHOOL OF DICKENS 

7. The Literary Fraternalism of Dickens, Reade, 
and Collins 

Although the personal and professional relations between 
Dickens, Reade, and Collins were by no means uniformly 
intimate, these novelists may nevertheless be said to have 
formed a school in much fuller sense than is usual among 
English writers. At the beginning of Collins's career as a 
professional writer in the early fifties, he and Dickens were 
already more than fellow workmen with common aims, and 
more they remained until the elder's death. From a Uttle 
after 1860, also, Collins was numbered among Reade's 
small circle of intimates. Between Reade and Dickens, 
however, the bond was of necessity mainly a fraternalism in 
art arising from devotion to common ideals. To the ex- 
pressed regret of both, personal association was rare, inas- 
much as practical interests drew them apart. Yet there is 
sufiicient evidence both for their substantial unanimity of 
creed as story-tellers and for their mutually affectionate 
admiration. Reade spoke of Dickens in terms of praise 
that he applied to no other contemporary; and Dickens, in 
turn, addressed Reade as a brother in the art at a time 
when hostile criticism was unusually busy with Griffith 
Gaunt. It is worth while noticing, too, that Reade was 
among those who were remembered after Boz's death with 
mementos from the great novelist's study. 

Dickens indeed was probably highly influential in Collins 's 
definitive choice of letters for a profession; for before jour- 

109 



110 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

nalism associated them in Household Words and All the Year 
Round, Dickens had constituted himself a kind of mentor 
to the younger man. *'I may assure you," he wrote to 
CoUins, December 20, 1852, concerning Basil, 'Hhat I have 
read the book with very great interest, and with a very 
thorough conviction that you have a call to this same art 
of fiction." ^ To a young man anxiously awaiting the 
reception of almost a first venture in letters, this praise 
from the greatest popular favorite of the generation must 
have seemed encouraging indeed. At all events, Basil 
was a turning point in Wilkie's career; and by September^ 
1856, he had proved himself sufficiently valuable for the 
editor of Household Words to desire his retention upon the 
staff. In September of that year Dickens wrote to his 
sub-editor Wills: "I have been thinking a good deal about 
Collins, and it strikes me the best thing we can do just now 
for Household Words is to add him on to Morley, and offer 
him five guineas a week. He is very suggestive, and ex- 
ceedingly quick to take my notions. Being industrious and 
reliable besides, I don't think we should be at an additional 
expense of £20 in the year by the transaction. ... I think 
it (the connection) would do him, in the long run, a world 
of good, and I am certain that by meeting together — 
dining three instead of two, and sometimes calling in Morley 
to boot — we should knock out much new fire." ^ 

At the time of this letter their acquaintance was already 
of several years' standing. They had met in 1851 ap- 
parently; prophetically enough their personal intimacy 
grew out of common interest in the theater and things 
theatrical. In September of the ensuing year Collins 
assisted in performances organized by Dickens for Tavistock 
House, the time from which personal friendship dates. 
In 1853 Wilkie wrote The Lighthouse to be performed in 

^ Letters, I, p. 294. ^ Charles Dickens as Editor, p. 221. 



THE SCHOOL OF DICKENS 111 

the same place, and the same year came his first serials for 
Household Words, Sister Rose, After Dark, and The Dead 
Secret. From that point onward Dickens was well enough 
assured of Collins's capabilities to admit him as a collabora- 
tor. Together in 1857 they wrote The Lazy Tour of Two 
Idle Apprentices, of which Dickens boasted that one could 
hardly tell where he left off and CoUins began. In 1858 
they wrote jointly the article entitled Dr. Dulcamara, M.P. 
for Household Words, sl critical essay of considerable import- 
ance in revealing their prepossessions in the art of fiction. 

Meanwhile, Collins was making good his claims to favor- 
able opinions in other ways. His Queen of Hearts appeared 
in All the Year Round in 1859; The Woman in White, his 
first great hit, which brought him esteem comparable with 
that of the foremost novelists, appeared serially in the same 
periodical the following year. After 1860 he was no longer 
the able but obscure henchman of the chief, for in that tale 
he had found a manner of narrative which he knew how to 
make peculiarly his own. The Woman in White, indeed, 
fastened upon him a reputation for plot construction which 
later in life he vainly tried to extend and enlarge by means 
of such purpose-stories as Man and Wife, The Law and the 
Lady, and Heart and Science. The vogue of The Woman 
in White shortly opened the columns of The Cornhill, the 
new shilling venture edited by Thackeray, to Armadale. 
Collins still remained a trusty in All the Year Round, upon 
whose judgment the editor strongly relied. He still col- 
laborated with Dickens in Christmas numbers of the journal, 
and during the chief's second visit to America, took over 
some of the editor's duties. 

Between Reade and Dickens there never existed the 
same degree either of personal or of professional intimacy 
as between Dickens and Collins. Although the elder 
novelist was probably the one contemporary the assertion 



112 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

of whose superiority to himself would not have provoked a 
characteristic fulmination from Reade, the author of Hard 
Cash was Uttle more professionally than a contributor 
whose one story for All the Year Round wrought unexpected 
havoc in the editorial sanctum and in the circulation. 
Reade, however, differed from Collins in that he had ac- 
quired a national reputation by It is Never too Late to Mend 
six or seven years before he published Hard Cash in Dickens's 
miscellany. From the first, however, he had felt the spell 
of Boz and had paid him the sincerest sort of flattery in 
Christie Johnstone. Singularly self-reliant and independent 
workman though Reade was, he went about London in 
disguise early in his apprenticeship to fiction, fancying that 
he could find incident and persons to capitalize as the 
master had done. This procedure, however, was not pro- 
ductive of more Swivelers, but of the realistic study of the 
Scotch fisher folk in Reade's second novel. Christie John- 
stone, in this sense, is probably more consciously imitative 
than any other story of his. 

Dickens and Reade first met through the kind oflSces of 
a fellow novelist whom they both greatly admired — Bulwer- 
Lytton. In November, 1859, Reade, already interested in 
International Copyright, visited Dickens armed with a 
letter of introduction which ran thus: "My dear Dickens, 
— Herewith let me present to you Mr. Charles Reade, 
whose works and pen are too well known to you to need 
lengthened introduction. He would like to talk to you on 
a favorite subject of his for improving the interests of 
authors. Yours ever, E. B.-Lytton." Whatever influence 
the meeting may or may not have had upon International 
Copyright, it was nevertheless the beginning of a friendship 
and mutual interest that lasted until Dickens's death. 
The younger man's admiration for the dramatic quality of 
Dickens, as has been indicated, was outspoken, and far 



THE SCHOOL OF DICKENS 113 

exceeded that which he yielded to any other contemporary. 
The nature of this homage, and one especial quality upon 
which it rested, appear in Reade's curious study The Eighth 
Commandment, 1860, in which his interest in copyright, 
particularly as it relates to stage pieces, bore fruit. ''Mr. 
Dickens," Reade asserts in chapter eight, ''is a great actor 
and a great dramatic novelist — i.e., a novelist out of whose 
early novels good plays have been cut by scribblers destitute 
of dramatic invention." ^ Again in the same book he wrote: 
"Mr. Dickens is the most extraordinary artist in one respect 
England ever produced. He is a first-rate writer of fiction, 
and a first-rate actor. England has had just five men of 
this sort in three hundred years — Shakespeare, Gibber, 
Macklin, Garrick and Dickens." That the admiration was 
mutual is apparent from the circumstances under which 
Dickens's comments on Reade were penned. There is 
good reason to suppose that Dickens wanted Reade upon 
the staff of All the Year Round as early as 1860; but the 
younger novelist, with three successful stories to his credit 
before that time, could hardly find such a relation profitable. 
In whatever capacity Reade's services may have been 
desired — whether as Mr. Lehmann ^ supposes in some 
such connection as Gollins's became, or merely as a con- 
tributor of projected sensational successors to It is Never 
too Late to Mend, we find Dickens writing to Wills, his sub- 
editor, under the date of September 26, 1860: "I have 
both heard Reade and seen him. There is only one ob- 
stacle, and that is a treaty he has with Ticknor & Fields. 
It is possible the obstacle may be overcome. We must 
have a talk about it. I have engaged him to dine here on 
Saturday in next week at six. ... I write by this post to 
Wilkie in order that notice of the feast may reach him on 

^ The Eighth Commandment, p. 154. 

2 Charles Dickens as Editor, N. Y. 1912, p. 281 (note). 



114 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

his coming to town." ^ It was somewhat over a year ap- 
parently before anything came of the scheme to secure 
Reade's cooperation. 

In January, 1862, there is another letter between Dickens 
and Wills concerning contributions from Reade to the 
journal. "He seems to me the best man to be got for our 
purpose," 2 the editor writes. ''But I think his terms will 
be higher than yours. I think you might at once go up to 
five and twenty pounds a week. But he may not be used 
to such receipts as I suppose. I would certainly pursue the 
idea with the intention of getting him as the best man to 
be got. No doubt he would be glad to work with me. I 
believe he has a respect for me." There was a slight hitch 
over terms. His employers desired the American rights to 
the story, which Reade estimated at about £300. Reade 
felt confident that All the Year Round must come to his 
terms. ^ ''Dickens," he wrote to Mrs. Sej^mour, ''is working 
J on a shilling serial and Collins going to The Cornhill. So I 
shall stand firm about the American streets, and, please 
God, shall publish the new story hot (i.e. writing each 
number up to time, instead of completing the whole before 
commencement) for All the Year Round. A clause gives 
me the right to bring it out three weeks before the termina- 
tion in the periodical, and when we shall have made £5000 
by publication we will combine a little dramatic spec." 
Wills seems to have conducted negotiations to the satisfac- 
tion of all concerned, for on the eighth of the month Dickens 
adds, apparently in reply to Wills's communication of 
Reade's acceptance: "Reade, good. I would give him 
what he asks, holding him to a certain space within which 
the story shall be comprised." ^ 

1 Charles Dickens as Editor, N. Y. 1912, p 281. 

2 Ibid., pp. 303-304. ^ Memoir of Charles Reade, p. 306. 
* Charles Dickens as Editor, p. 305. 



THE SCHOOL OF DICKENS 115 

The story by which All the Year Round was to be so 
benefited finally appeared as Hard Cash, a title to which 
Dickens suggested the alternative Safe as the Bank. But 
the serial from which both writer and publisher obviously 
expected great things, oddly proved a great disappointment 
in its periodical form; and the chief results of Reade's only 
publication under the auspices of his master were the reduc- 
tion of the circulation of the magazine by three thousand 
copies and a very narrowly averted quarrel with its editor 
and proprietor. Though no novel combines in more even 
balance all the elements that made Reade popular — the 
vivid dramatic method, the unflagging variety of incident 
and scene, the sincere reformatory purpose, and characters, 
like the Dodd family and Dr. Sampson, among the best he 
ever drew — the serial by no means pleased readers of 
All the Year Round.^ Moreover, Dickens made no secret 
of his disapproval of views that Reade expressed in the story. 

The trouble arose because the novelist with customary 
vigor fell upon The Lunacy Commission, of which John 
Forster was a member. Reade tried his best to exonerate 
Forster; but the editor took two occasions to remark in 
print that he did not share his contributor's opinions. The 
instalment of Hard Cash for November 14, 1863, has a 
few lines in description of an energetic conmiissioner that 
are meant to appease Forster and Dickens, to which the 
latter appended the following footnote: ''The conductor 
of this journal desires to take this opportunity of expressing 
his personal belief that no public servants do their duty 
with greater ability, humanity, and independence than the 
Commissioners in Lunacy." Not satisfied with this, the 
editor attached another disavowal to Reade's concluding 
number, December 26, 1863. "The statements and opinions 
of this journal generally are, of course, to be received as the 
^ See CoUins's The Unknown Public in My Miscellanies. 



116 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

statements and opinions of its conductor. But this is not 
so in the case of a work of fiction first pubhshed in these 
pages as a serial storj^ with the name of an eminent writer 
attached to it. When one of my literary brothers does me 
the honor to undertake such a task, I hold that he executes 
it on his own personal responsibility, and for the sustain- 
ment of his own reputation; and I do not consider myself 
at liberty to exercise that control over his text which I 
claim as to other contributions." 

Contrary to his usual custom Reade did not rejoin, prob- 
ably from disinclination *'to quarrel with the master of us 
all," ^ though he was ready enough for a tilt with Dr. Bush- 
nan, who attempted to defend his profession from the abuses 
Reade alleged in Hard Cash. Subsequently, no doubt, 
Reade was unsafe for All the Year Round and too expensive. 
The proprietor could hardly care for serials which injured 
his sales and at the same time rendered him responsible for 
opinions which he did not hold. Furthermore, Reade by 
this time was able to dispose of his sensational wares to 
more profitable markets than Dickens could offer. Dickens 
paid £300 for the serial rights to Hard Cash. Reade's next 
two novels, Griffith Gaunt and Foul Play, represent his most 
highly paid work. For the first he had £1500; for Foul 
Play £2000 from Smith of The Cornhill. The fact is that 
Dickens, whose sensationalism depended very little upon 
ilUcit love, did not altogether approve the younger men's 
much-berated novels like Griffith or Armadale.'^ In Febru- 
ary, 1867, when Reade was planning legal proceedings as an 
answer to the critics' strictures on Griffith Gaunt, he ap- 
parently requested Dickens, through Collins, to testify in 
court in favor of the book. Thus solicited, Dickens ex- 
pressed the opinion, by means of a letter to ColUns for 

1 E. H. House, The Atlantic Monthly, October, 1887, p. 526. 

2 Chatto and Windus's Edition of Hard Cash, preface. 



THE SCHOOL OF DICKENS 117 

Reade, that the novel is 'Hhe work of a highly accomplished 
writer and a good man." If he were pressed in cross ex- 
amination, however, he admits that he should be obliged 
to confess that three scenes are ''extremely coarse and 
disagreeable." ^ Again in the same collection of letters — 
those to Collins, collected by Mr. Hutton — we find Dickens 
cautioning his prot^g^ that certain scenes in Armadale are 
too coarse for acting. At the same time that Dickens 
objects to certain scenes in Reade's story, he desires Collins 
to say to him ''everything that is brotherly in the art." 

Just where or how the friendship between Collins and 
Reade began neither of the latter's biographers relates; 
but that it was more intimate than that which existed be- 
tween Dickens and Reade is perfectly clear. That they 
met as early as 1860, then both professional novelists of 
some seven or eight years' standing, is indicated by Dickens's 
letter to Wills previously cited. Reade's great admiration 
for Collins was sufficiently explicit. Coleman quotes among 
Reade's "obiter dicta": "For literary ingenuity in building 
up a plot and investing it with mystery, give me dear old 
Wilkie Colhns against the world." ^ Reade's nephew, a 
rather less certain guide than Coleman in matters of opinion, 
remarks^ that "If it were not heresy, we should almos: be 
tempted to hint that he reverenced the plot weaver of 
intricate texture as profoundly as Dickens, the incomparable 
humourist. This would hardly be correct, yet it may not 
be impertinent to add that whereas he and Dickens were 
on terms of friendship, his friendship with Wilkie Collins had 
ripened into intimacy." "Go at once and see him," he 
wrote peremptorily to Mrs. Seymour, on hearing of his 
friend's illness, "in bed or out of bed." 

* Letters from Charles Dickens to Wilkie Colins, pp. 1S2-1S3; 138-140. 
2 John Coleman's Charles Reade as I Knew Him, p. 265. 
^ Memoir of Charles Reade, p. 343. 



118 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

That this personal interest extended to friendly criticism 
and suggestion, at least occasionally, in the preparation for 
market of each other's stories, we know from letters and 
prefaces, which serve to show not only the quality of this 
personal and professional intimacy, but its technical nature. 
Collins twice makes reference to the author of Hard Cash 
in prefatory remarks. The Two Destinies has a dedication, 
dated 1876, to Charles Reade which runs as follows: '^You 
read the story while it was in course of periodical publica- 
tion, and you found in it a certain novelty of design and 
treatment which pleased and interested you. Now that 
my work is completed, let me ask you to accept the dedica- 
tion of The Two Destinies. I can acknowledge in no fitter 
way the pleasure that I feel in having satisfied my old 
friend and brother in the Art." Again, almost at the end 
of his career, in A Rogue's Life, Wilkie evidently referred to 
Reade for suggestions about life in the Australian bush, 
whither he finally conducts his ne'er-do-well hero. A 
Rogue's Life is for Collins a singularly sketchy narrative. 
Reade, in Never too Late to Mend, had got up material on 
Australia with his usual care, and had presented it entirely 
to the satisfaction of his public. Collins clearly intended to 
rely upon his friend's special knowledge in reworking a 
story, the workmanship of which did not satisfy him. His 
statement of this is dated March, 1879. '^Year after year, 
I delayed the publication, proposing, at the suggestion of 
my old friend, Charles Reade, to enlarge the present sketch 
of the hero's adventures in AustraUa. But the opportunity 
of carrying out this project has proved to be one of the lost 
opportunities of my life." 

Friendly criticism and suggestion did not come from 
Reade only, however; there is extant among the manu- 
scripts and letters of the latter a rather elaborate series of 
suggestions and criticisms of Put Yourself in his Place, 



THE SCHOOL OF DICKENS 119 

supplied evidently at Reade's request while the novel was 
running serially in The Cornhill. For once we may judge 
with some accuracy as to the nature of these interchanges. 
The criticism is entitled Considerations for R, and has in 
the margin a note by Reade to the effect that he was so 
fortunate as to please him (Collins, of course,) at last." 
''I start," ^ Wilkie writes, ''from the December number — 
and I say the interest in the character is so strong, the 
collision of human passions is so admirably and so subtly 
struck out that the public will have no more of new trade's 
unions and their outrages. They will skip pages 3, 4, 5 in 
the November number — they will resent the return to 
the subject in the December number. I don't suggest the 
alteration of these, I only say what I say as a warning for 
the future. Keep to the cutlers, and keep the cutlers 
mixed up with Henry, Coventry, Grace and Jael, and you 
are safe. 

''Now as to the brickmakers. I have read the report. 
They are even worse than the cutlers. But as an artist and 
as a just man you don't take the worst case for illustration. 
You take the medium case which may apply generally to 
all trade unions. 

"If I had the story to finish, I should make the capitalist's 
difficulty in setting up the buildings for working Henry's 
invention arise from his knowledge of what the brickmakers 
will certainly do. I should make him put this forcibly in 
dialogue with Henry — and I should make Henry feel, 
exactly what a reader will feel, unmeasurable disgust at 
this repetition of tyranny, outrage, and murder. 'What! 
am I to go through it all again with the brickmakers? More 
conspiracies, more explosions, mutilations and deaths? 
That's the prospect, Mr. Little! Am I to give up my 
inventions; and are you to give up your profits? No; 
^ Memoir of Charles Reade, p. 343. 



120 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

we are to look out for a ready-made article in the shape of 
an empty building which will suit us, — and give the brick- 
makers the go-by in that way.' 

''The building as formed in your plot — and there are 
the brickmakers just touched and dismissed, and the story 
running on again, with the setting up of the saw grinding 
machinery and all the incidents which follow, with this 
additional advantage, that Henry does not do over again 
with the brickmakers what he has already done with the 
cutlers. 

''As to other points. 1. Hurry the story (if possible) to 
Henry's proposal to Grace to marry him, and go away with 
him, and to Grace's refusal. You want that strong point 
and that definite result after keeping the suspended interest 
so long vibrating backwards and forwards between Grace's 
two lovers. 

"2. I doubt a second blowing up with gun powder. Can 
the necessary results be arrived at in no other way? Can 
it not be done by a prearranged escape of gas, for instance? 
Or by some other explosive or destructive agent? 

"The scenes in the ruined church are so admirable and 
original that I want the church to play an important part in 
the story. Would it be possible to make Mr. Raby repair 
and reconsecrate it for public worship? Then to make the 
marriage of Grace and Coventry take place in it? And then 
to have the marriage invalidated by some informality in 
the consecration, or in the registration for marriages, of the 
newly restored church? 

"I don't know whether such an event as this could be 
possible; or whether, if it could be possible, you could 
harmonize my idea with your notion of the uncertified 
clergyman? 

"But it seems to me a good point to make the old church 
in which Henry has worked and suffered for Grace the 



THE SCHOOL OF DICKENS 121 

retributive agent in defeating Coventry, and uniting Henry 
to the woman he loves. 

*'The first marriage celebrated in the church might be 
the marriage of Coventry and Grace, and so all the difficulty 
about the marriages of other couples might be avoided. 

''Or perhaps you already mean to end the story with the 
marriage of Henry and Grace in the restored old church. 
Anyhow, I, as a reader, certify the church to be an in- 
teresting character." 

This snarl of business, technical mentorship, and mutual 
admiration suggests the most essential bond between Dickens 
and his most notable followers. The chance association of 
Dickens and Collins through the theater, and Reade's in- 
sistence upon the drama in Boz's art are highly significant. 
Yet they were not imitators of each other; each had his own 
distinct province of this dramatic cult, his own characteristic 
variation of the essentially melodramatic pattern. In their 
own time indeed their several originalities concealed the 
substantial unanimity of their scheme of narrative art. 
The similarity of Reade and Dickens, for instance, was 
often opined to be a moral rather than literary similarity. 
Such an opinion is roughly based upon the fact that both 
made themselves often somewhat recklessly champions of 
reform. But a professed moral purpose — even a reforma- 
tory thesis — is no safe distinction among the Victorian 
novelists. Early or late, most tale-tellers of note preached 
definite reform, literary, social, or religious, in the then 
favorite novel-shape. Trollope in Ralph the Heir and again 
in Chapter 12 of his Autobiography speaks of the preach- 
ment as the novelist's ''snake in the grass"; Besant, in his 
Art of Fiction, lays down a distinct purpose as almost a 
canon of novel- writing; Thackeray, in the preface to 
Pendennis previously cited, pointedly compares the grave 
professor and the novelist as fellow workers. The truth is 



122 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

that the Victorians would not have been allowed, had they 
wished to do so, to raise the slogan of art for art's sake. 
Nor did they wish to do so. 

As for the Dickens group, moral similarities and differ- 
ences require some discrimination. However friendly in 
personal relations, however zealously each in his own way 
followed the popular fashion and made his stories explicit 
indictments of cheap schools, Scotch marriages, or trades 
unions, the dissimilarity of their views and interests upon 
questions apart from fiction-writing is quite as striking as 
the likeness. Neither Collins nor Reade had any especial 
interest in the poorer classes as such. Mr. Chesterton, it is 
true, speaks of Dickens and his followers as ''hilarious 
democrats"; but the description wants considerable qualifi- 
cation. Colhns personally was not a little the cynic and a 
great deal the man of the world. The classes whom Dickens 
championed with fervor are not the classes that afforded 
Wilkie his materials; almost invariably it is middle-class 
folk with whom he concerns himself; and there is little 
evidence that he greatly perturbed himself about the social 
or political future of the masses. He is more remote from 
these interests than either Dickens or Reade; and even his 
specifically "purposed" novels ^ deal with reform in another 
realm — with athletics in the universities, with Scotch 
marriage laws, and with the dubious verdict "not proven." 
In a different way Collins is not less distinctly middle class 
in his interests and appeal than Anthony Trollope himself. 

Nor is Reade less essentially different from the master 
than Collins, despite the excitable sympathy that in specific 
cases he extended to the needy and oppressed, and the 
emotional fervor with which his novels or letters preached 
the reforms in which he engaged. In this fervor and abandon 

^ They generally involve questions of law, the profession for which 
Colhns was trained. 



THE SCHOOL OF DICKENS 123 

there was indeed a moral similarity and at the same time a 
difference — the similarity of absolute, absorbing sincerity 
for the time being, and of determination to make the world 
know the truth. But Reade never wrote of the lower 
orders of society as if he were of them, nor indeed was he. 
He stood consciously aloof from the persons of unlucky 
workmen or unfortunates wrongfully confined to asylums 
whose causes he championed with fervor. He is a jurist, 
a humanitarian gentleman who condescends to succor a 
sick cab driver with brandy. As a matter of fact he hated 
both cab drivers and brandy.^ And next day when the 
cabman calls to acknowledge the kindness the novelist is 
''not at home." Cab drivers, once the gentleman had 
performed a needed service, he remembered to be anathema; 
and the British workman, he thought, especially after some 
members of that fraternity inconvenienced him at Albert 
Gate, a beast. For the Sheffield workmen he had little 
liking; to him they were dirty and they were dull.^ His 
sympathies with their class are not at all the same as those 
in Hard Times. Specific instances apart, Reade as distinctly 
as George Meredith was a worshiper of ''brain-stuff." It 
was not in their philosophy of society or of life that one must 
look for the essential bond between the Dickensian group. 
Indeed they hardly possessed any such thing. The bond is 
rather in the artistic aims and ideals, in their conception of 
narrative art, and in their belief that it affords a means of 
inculcating serious truth as legitimate and perhaps as effica- 
cious as any other means available to the publicist. The 
common basis of this narrative art is indisputably to be 
found among their random critical utterances; what it was 
in the words of the novelists themselves it now becomes the 
task to set forth. 

1 E. H. House, Atlantic Monthly, October, 1887, p. 526. 

2 "Builders' Blunders," article in Readiana. 



124 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

8. Their Creed of Fiction 



The exigencies of the three-volume fashion were largely- 
responsible for the circumstance that sooner or later most 
of the Victorians in the course of their narratives fell to 
gossiping upon the art of fiction. ''The novelist," Bulwer 
remarked when he had forsaken the Cliffords and the Arams 
for the Caxtons, ''should be a comfortable, garrulous, com- 
municative fortune teller; not a grim, laconical, oracular 
sybil." This sentiment, which is notably apphcable to the 
"low-heeled buskin" of Victorian fiction, as TroUope has it, 
fortunately renders it possible to discover generally in the 
novelists' own words the rough principles upon which they 
worked. Byron's famous remark about Dryden's prefaces 
holds true of Thackeray's incidental commentary upon his 
narrative, or of Trollope's, George Eliot's, or Charles Reade's. 
Dickens's followers especially recorded their ideals and 
opinions extensively, not indeed to pad the volume, but to 
justify their methods to the public and critics who aspersed 
them. Dickens himself insisted that a book ought of all 
things to stand by itself — that is, without explanation or 
argumentative justification from its author; but his less 
reticent juniors stood ready to take up cudgels at a moment's 
notice with a hostile critic, if indeed they had not already 
anticipated him in a preface. Consequently the ideal 
constitution of their romance — their favorite materials, 
the relation to fact, their restless experimentation, their 
attitude toward those of a different practice from their 
own — is a matter not so much of inference as of record. 

The common basis of this romance is indicated in two 
brief statements of design by Dickens. "I always had it 
in my mind," he says of Little Nell, "to surround the lovely 



THE SCHOOL OF DICKENS 125 

figure of the child with grotesque and wild but not im- 
possible companions, and to gather about her innocent face 
and pure intentions, associates as strange and uncongenial 
as the grim objects that are about her bed when her history 
is first foreshadowed." ^) The concluding sentence of the 
preface to Bleak House insists upon the same principle in 
words which serve as a rough formula: ''In Bleak House 
I have purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of familiar 
things." This quest of the romantic in the commonplace 
is the first distinction of the Dickens group. "There are 
places which at first sight appear inaccessible to romance; 
and such a place was Mr. Wardlaw's dining room in Russell 
Square." — So begins Foul Play, the extraordinary story of 
a ticket-of-leave man, a scuttled ship, and a pair of cast- 
aways in mid-Pacific which Reade and Dion Boucicault 
appropriated without leave from a French melodrama. 
The Moonstone has the same burden. Old Gabriel Betterton 
reflects upon the mystery in which his yoimg mistress's 
jewel has involved the family: "Here was our quiet English 
house suddenly invaded by a devilish Indian diamond — 
bringing after it a conspiracy of living rogues set loose on 
us by the vengeance of a dead man Who ever heard the 
like of it in the nineteenth century mind; in an age of 
progress and a country which rejoices in the blessing of the 
British constitution?" "Wild yet domestic," was Dickens's 
description of The Moonstone to his sub-editor Wills in a 
phrase suggestive equally of his own work and that of his 
juniors. Dickens ransacks the slums of London,) Collins 
searches beneath the apparently prosy exterior of middle- 
class life, Reade exploits the iniquities of penitentiary and 
madhouse — it is all one ; they are all striving, as Collins 
remarks of some coincidences in Hearts and Science, to force 
realization that "not one man in ten thousand living in the 

1 Preface to The Old Curiosity Shop. 



126 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

midst of reality has discovered that he is also living in the 
midst of romance." There is an old cartoon of Reade which 
graphically conveyed this notion to periodical readers half 
a century ago. The novelist, in conventional costume, 
bestrides a pen for his Pegasus, and carries over one shoulder 
a pennant inscribed ''imagination." He is mounting sky- 
ward from the dull, murky earth, which is labeled ''everyday 
life," scattering as he goes foolscap sheets entitled Griffith 
Gaunt, Foul Play, and A Terrible Temptation. 

For Dickens and his followers, then, romance had little 
to do with history. The master himself experimented with 
it upon any extended plan but twice, — once with the 
Gordon riots in Barnaby Rudge, and again with the Paris 
of the Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities. Reade wrought 
only one genuine historical novel ; for the historical elements 
of Griffith Gaum and The Wandering Heir, both stories of 
English life in the eighteenth century, are casual and sub- 
ordinate. ColHns never reverted to the materials of the 
experimental Antonina. One prime reason for thus con- 
fining romance practically to the present Reade stated 
cynically enough. In revulsion from the extraordinary 
labors demanded by The Cloister and the Hearth, he declared 
to Coleman that he should never attempt a similar story. 
"I write for the public, and the public don't care about the 
dead. They are more interested in the great tragi-comedy 
of humanity that is around and about them and environs 
them at every crossing, in every hole and every corner. 
An aristocratic divorce suit, the last great social scandal, a 
sensational suicide from Waterloo Bridge, a woman murdered 
in Seven Dials, or a baby found strangled in a bandbox at 
Piccadilly Circus interests them more than Margaret's 
piety or Gerard's journey to Rome. For one reader who has 
read The Cloister and the Hearth, a thousand have read It is 



THE SCHOOL OF DICKENS 127 

Never too Late to Mend. The paying public prefers a live 
ass to a dead lion." ^ 

This variety of romance, generally taking its materials 
from the present, was dubbed by Reade "matter-of-fact 
romance." ^ It was unfriendly alike to the stereotyped 
traditional forms and to classical narrative. How roughly 
Dickens and Collins dealt with The Heir of Redcliffe because 
its people are conventional figures with no types in nature, 
embodying merely the ideals of a religious cult, we have 
seen. Again Collins's romantic old gentleman in the Peti- 
tion to Novel Writers concludes by protesting a set of romantic 
formulas which he prays the story writers subsequently to 
avoid. This set of proscriptions, curiously enough, Collins 
might readily have copied from the Bulwer to whom he 
paid homage before he felt the spell of Dickens. The 
romantic old gentleman urges that it is time the hero ended 
drawing himself up to his full height, striding, folding his 
arms, riding away after the quarrel with his lady-love upon 
his steed; let us have an end too of the fair girl, ''five feet 
nothing," who marries happily and of the tall dark sister whose 
fate is invariably tragic. Classical narrative except when 
exhibiting a model method, as Defoe's did to Reade, or when 
flavored by the thoroughgoing masculinity of the eighteenth- 
century novelists, was little to their liking. Though Dickens 
in the fourth chapter of David Copperfield instances especially 
Robinson Crusoe, Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, Roderick 
Random, and Peregrine Pickle as youthful favorites, there is 
no mention of Richardson or Sterne. Like many Anglo 
Saxons, he found representations of classical French tragedy 
intolerably dull, despite his unusual love of the theater. 
Collins's fling at the narrative writing of the eighteenth 
century is doubtless expressive of the Dickensian's general 

^ Charles Reade as I Knew Him, p. 263. 

^ His definition of the term may be found in the preface to Hard Cash. 



128 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

attitude. The solution of the moonstone mystery is the 
result of a physician's curious experiment. As a condition 
for this experiment he finds it essential to keep his patient's 
mind absolutely quiet; and to that end provides at the 
crucial moment for reading matter — *' The Guardian, The 
Taller, Richardson's Pamela, Mackenzie's Man of Feeling, 
Roscoe's Lorenzo de Medici, and Robertson's Charles the 
Fifth, — all classical works; all (of course) immeasurably 
superior to anything produced nowadays ; and all (from my 
present point of view) possessing the one great merit of en- 
chaining nobody's interest and exciting nobody's brains." 

This was the essential basis of their creed — the romance 
of the here and now; and the romance of the here and now 
was, it appeared, the essential characteristic of Victorian sen- 
sationalism. With this choice of material, however, there 
went professedly a distinctive narrative method. The 
designation ''dramatic fiction" was apparently devised, or 
at least given currency, by Reade. His implied interpreta- 
tion of it in the comment on Dickens previously quoted — 
''novels out of which scribblers without invention have 
cut good plays" — is supplemented by a remark or two 
from his Auto-Criticism of Christie Johnstone} The auto- 
criticism, as the title suggests, is Reade's own estimate of 
that early novel, jotted down presumably for diversion. 
On the title page of the novel the full name of the story 
runs Christie Johnstone; A Dramatic Story. "The origin 
of the title," says Reade, "seems to be the amount of pure 
dialogue in the work." Later he remarks that the plot "is 
of that arbitrary kind that befits a play rather than a 
story." The principles according to which this arbitrary 
type of story was to be told we shall find recorded with 
considerable fulness in the novelists' own words. The few 
recorded opinions of Dickens, upon whose practice both 

^ Memoir of Charles Reade, p. 228. 



THE SCHOOL OF DICKENS 129 

Collins and Reade built, are entitled on all grounds to 
priority. The rather fragmentary statements of the elder 
novelist are, however, considerably supplemented by those 
of Reade and Collins. With such a sketch of their dogma 
before us, we may contrast with it the position of the realists; 
and finally ascertain some significant influence that the 
dramatic cult may have had upon subsequent novel-writing. 

II 

There are numerous reasons why utterances by Dickens 
upon the art of fiction are sporadic and unsystematic. 
Few writers have led a busier professional life. Few, more- 
over, have been less thinkers about literature; and for all 
his confidence in himself and in his mission Dickens instinc- 
tively seems to have recognized this. He steadily dis- 
claimed the title of critic, and advised fellow novelists 
generally to do likewise. ^'Not to play the sage or critic 
(neither of which parts, I hope, is in my line) " — he wrote 
to Collins upon the appearance of Basil in 1852, and went 
on to protest in some detail against the elaborate and bellig- 
erent preface his young friend had written. Even in his 
explanations to tyros in fiction of the rejection of manu- 
script stories for All the Year Round — a task which surely 
encourages ex cathedra, dogmatic judgments — Dickens re- 
mains not merely clear and decisive, but modest and mod- 
erate as to the grounds upon which he rules. ''You will, of 
course, receive my opinion as that of an individual writer 
and student of art, who by no means claims to be infallible," 
he writes in refusing a proffered three-volume story. He 
proceeds: ''Try if you can achieve success within these 
modest limits (I have practiced in my time what I preach 
to you) and in the meantime put your three volumes away." 
The man who wrote thus was editor of one of the most popu- 



130 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

lar miscellanies of the time and the most phenomenally 
successful novelist. He had in fact a settled and lifelong 
aversion to the customary long prefaces of the day. ''A 
book (of all things) " — he told Collins in the same letter ^ 
about Basil — "should speak for and explain itself;" and 
repeated the same advice to Lord Lytton when that novelist 
was debating an explanatory preface for A Strange Story. 
"Let the book explain itself," Dickens urged, at the same 
time indicating in it "a noble eloquence" which to him 
provides all necessary elucidation. Yet instinctive and 
unbookish as Dickens's art was, it would be the gravest 
mistake to assume uncertainty in his narrative creed or 
practice. How he wanted a story told he knew quite as 
well as the most philosophical of novelists; and in his 
capacity as editor of a periodical and mentor extraordinary 
to Wilkie Collins, he has recorded a sufficient number of 
impressions and preferences to enable some understanding 
of the dramatic method. 

It is not singular, certainly, that in such scraps of casual 
criticism upon his art as Dickens left he seems to stress and 
require from others the peculiar devices which his own 
novels copiously exemplify. Let the actors carry on the 
story; make them do so consistently with themselves as 
distinct and individualized persons, not as the marionettes 
of a show-master; let the narrative abound in contrasts, 
and give it an elaborated significant background; do not 
reject extraordinary solutions -of plot when they can be 
given a reasonable plausibility. All this sounds obvious, 
orthodox, and elementary enough. To such principles 
pedestrian Trollope, whose work is in principle and effect 
directly opposite to Dickens's, would have assented; for 
Trollope professed his belief in sensationalism of a kind also. 
It is not less in the substance of than in the stress upon 

1 Letters^ I, p. 294. 



THE SCHOOL OF DICKENS 131 

these elementary notions of method that the individuality 
of the school of Dickens lies. 

Dickens insisted upon making the narrative work dramati- 
cally and was a severe critic of writers who failed to do so. 
"It strikes me that you constantly hurry your narrative 
(yet without getting on)'' — he tells one aspirant — ''by 
telling it in a sort of impetuous, breathless way, in your 
own person, when the people should tell it and act for them- 
selves. My notion is that when I have made the people 
play out the play, it is, as it were, their business to do it 
and not mine." ^ This insistence upon dramatic propriety 
appears again in nis letter to Collins concerning The Woman 
in White, in which, despite his admiration for its characteri- 
zation and advance in tenderness, he missed the true 
dramatic instinct. After specifying appreciation of its 
superior delicacy as compared with its predecessors and 
admiring the delineation of Mr. Fairlee, Marian Halcombe, 
and Sir Percival, Dickens remarks: "I seem to have noticed 
here and there that the great pains you take express them- 
selves a trifle too much. . . . But turning to the book I 
find it difficult to take out an instance of this. It belongs 
to your habit of thought and manner of going about the 
work. Perhaps I express my meaning best when I say that 
the three people who write the narratives in these proofs 
have a dissective quality in common which is essentially 
not theirs but yours; and that my own effort would be to 
strike more of what is got in that way out of them by colli- 
sion with one another and by the working of the story." ^ 
There seems to have been no other failure in narrative art 
so serious in Dickens's estimation as this. Certainly there 
is no stricture on fellow workmen's art that he presses so 
often, unless it be failure to master the serial design he set. 
To a less distinguished story-teller than Collins we find him 

1 Letters, II, pp. 249-250. ^ Letters, II, pp. 110-111. 



132 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

once more repeating the objection. Concerning a doubt- 
fully available story by a Miss King, he writes on February 
9, 1855: ''My doubts arise partly from the nature of the 
interest which I fear requires presentation as a whole, and 
partly on your manner of relating the tale. The people do 
not sufficiently work out their own purposes in dialogue and 
dramatic action. You are too much their exponent; what 
you do for them, they ought to do for themselves." ^ The 
drift of these comments appears plain. In a notable degree 
the persons of the story are to be made to talk, to act in 
their proper persons, and thus to develop a story. Dissec- 
tion and analysis of character by the novelist to Dickens 
spells futile narrative art. 

All this, plainly enough also, implies accentuation of the 
common methods of drama and novel. The same letter 
previously cited — that to Mrs. Brookfield — has a further 
scrap of doctrine directly supplementary to these pronounce- 
ments on dramatic plausibility. The story which that lady 
submitted contained a death bed scene, evidently very badly 
written, which called for especial comment. Evidently the 
scene as written missed opportunities in a way that to a 
sensational novelist seemed grossly inept and wasteful. 
"Would you not say what kind of a room it was, whether 
it was sunUght, starlight, or moonlight? Wouldn't you 
have a strong impression on your mind of how you were 
received, where you first met the look of the dying man, 
what strange contrasts were about j^ou and struck you? 
I don't want you, in a novel, to present yourself, to tell 
such things, but I want the things to be there. You make 
no more of the situation than the index might or a descrip- 
tive playbill might in giving a summary of the tragedy 
under representation." ^ Such criticism means, of course, 
that he would have Mrs. Brookfield 's scene written more 

1 Letters, III, p, 162. 2 Letters, II, pp. 249-250. 



THE SCHOOL OF DICKENS 133 

or less in the fashion of Little Nell's death or Paul Dombey's, 
with the wealth of detail and contrasts that his own powers 
of observation would have discovered in the surroundings. 
This demand for elaboration of the effect is supplemented 
in Dickens's letter to Wills concerning Collins's No Name. 
No Name had for its central figure a young woman brought 
up in considerable luxury who is suddenly deprived of her 
right to the name she has always borne through defective 
marriage laws. Through an oversight of her parents, she 
becomes legally and technically illegitimate. Written in 
the early sixties when the popular drift toward realism — 
stories of domestic life — had compelled some modification 
of Collins's and Reade's original melodramatic scheme, 
No Name is one of Wilkie's most elaborate studies in the 
feminine. The story obviously presented difficulties in 
method, about which Dickens wrote to his sub-editor Wills 
that he realized the impossibility of Collins's changing 
greatly what he had done. ''My suggestions," he goes on, 
''went mainly to the warning that it must inevitably come 
to pass that the more severely and persistently he tells the 
story unrelieved by whimsical playing about it the more he 
will detract from the steadiness and inflexibility of purpose 
in the girl. She cannot possibly be brought out as he 
wants to bring her out without it." ^ These remarks have 
not only their obvious place in a definition of the character- 
istic Dickensian elaboration of the melodrama, but they also 
probably explain the presence in No Name of the threadbare 
but scrupulously shaven Captain Wragge — a rather obvious 
copy from Messrs. Micawber and Montague Glass. In 
this matter of elaboration of effect there is by no means 
unanimity among the dramatic trio — at least not in the 
means employed. Reade's notable rejection of such senti- 
mental pictorial ornament as is suggested by Dickens's 
^ Charles Dickens as Editor, p. 307. 



134 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

requirements will be noted subsequently. Yet in a wider 
sense which the words intimate — the desire, whether by 
means of pictorial description or other to realize the com- 
plete possibilities of effect — Dickens suggests the essential 
of Victorian sensationalism; and in this he and his fol- 
lowers quite agree. 

The scheme of narrative that we find Dickens insisting 
upon, reminiscent in every detail of his own well known 
practice, had one more principle. Adherence to it on the 
part of the master and his followers has alternately amused 
and annoyed the critics ever since. It has to do with the 
adventitious in plot. How they one and all cut the Gordian 
knot of their difficulties — how the miraculous surgical 
operation permits Griffith Gaunt and his Kate to live 
happily ever after, how Mr. Tulkinghorn's nets about Lady 
Dedlock are rent asunder, how Hester Dethridge accom- 
plishes the death of Geoffrey Delamayn — is notorious. 
The question came up in Dickens's own work in connection 
with A Tale of Two Cities; there are various expressions 
of opinion by Collins upon the allied matter of that which 
transcends experience, some of which will be cited later. 
The elder's puzzlement, stated in a letter to Bulwer-Lytton 
dated June 5, 1860, runs as follows: '^I am not clear and 
I never have been clear, respecting the canon of fiction 
which forbids the interposition of accident in such cases as 
Mme. Defarge's death. Where the accident in such cases 
is inseparable from the passion and emotion of the character, 
where it is strictly consistent with the whole design, and 
arises out of some culminating proceeding on the part of 
the character which the whole story has led up to, it seems 
to me to become, as it were, an act of divine justice. And 
when I use Miss Pross (though this is quite another matter) 
to bring about that catastrophe, I have positive intention 
of^making that half-comic intervention a part of the desper- 



THE SCHOOL OF DICKENS 135 

ate woman's failure and of opposing that mean death — 
instead of a desperate one in the streets, which she wouldn't 
have minded — to the dignity of Carton's wrong or right; 
this was the design, and seemed to be in the fitness of 
things." ^ 

The doctrine of Dickens was so casual, inconsecutive, and 
fragmentary that the word creed in connection with him 
seems at first glance pretentious and misleading. It is 
indeed easy to understand why criticism until recently 
has regarded him largely as an anomaly with few who were 
really kin and none who were like. With those phases of 
his art in which there is justification of such a view we are 
not here concerned. In his narrative art in the narrow 
sense — the manipulation of the story — he clearly insists 
upon the expedients in which his own stories abound. ^ He 
is the maker of a certain variety of romance, the material 
of which he seeks close about him, in a narrative form 
carried on as far as may be by the actors themselves. It 
abounds in pictorial detail, studied contrasts, and startling 
climaxes, and is not disdainful of extraordinary intervention 
in the solution of plots. / These things stand out as promi- 
nently in his advice to fellow novelists as in the pages 
of Barnaby Rudge or A Tale of Two Cities. And these 
devices also describe the narrative habits of his followers. 
Essentially upon these principles the younger men wrought 
a series of fictions in effect thoroughly individual, yet only 
modified and adapted from the Dickens creed. Inclination 
and circumstance made Reade and Collins considerably 
more loquacious about the theory of novel-making than 
Dickens, so that from their curious critical pieces it is possible 
to fill out in some detail the very general and incomplete 
statements of the master. 

1 Letters, II, p. 117. 



136 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

III 

As early as Basil, it will be recalled, Collins penned a 
preface which Dickens opined would be better away. That 
preface is significant of Reade's and its author's invariable 
insistence upon the priority of plot in fiction, and lays down 
several desiderata of no less importance. ''Believing that 
the novel and the play are twin sisters in the family of 
fiction; and that one is drama narrated, as the other is 
drama acted, and that all the deep and strong emotions that 
the play-writer is privileged to excite, the novel-writer is 
privileged to excite also, I have not thought it either politic 
or necessary, while adhering to realities, to adhere to every- 
day realities only. In other words I have not stooped so 
low as to assure myself of the reader's belief in the prob- 
ability of my story, by never calling on him to exercise his 
faith. Those extraordinary accidents and events which 
happen to few men, seem to me as legitimate materials for 
fiction to work with — when there is a good object in using 
them — as the ordinaiy accidents which may and do happen 
to us all." The parallel of the drama, the plea for strong 
passions, and the defense of the extraordinary in incident 
find echo in Reade's dictum that ''fertile situations are the 
true cream of fiction," and that, with these supplied, ''any 
professional writer can do the rest." ^ What fertile situa- 
tions, to his mind, are may be inferred from the context. 
The remark occurs in a discussion of George Eliot's methods 
and his own in which he declares that there are but three 
such situations all told in Felix Holt and The Mill on the 
Floss. The drowning of Maggie and Tom is one; the 
startling surprise scene in which Harold Tremaine learns 
that Jarmyn is his father is a second. Precept and example 
clearly incline to melodrama. 

1 Bookman, 18, 252. 



THE SCHOOL OF DICKENS 137 

Collins's phrase — "those extraordinary accidents and 
events which happen to few men" — is significant. It 
must not be supposed that they convey the romancer 
hcense to evolve the romantic stuff from the recesses of his 
imagination. On the contrary, with our group of fictionists, 
the more unusual their incidents the more certain we may 
be that they have authority. Reade's Autobiography of a 
Thief gives readers a hint on this score. "I feign prob- 
abihties," he says; ''I record improbabilities. The former 
are conjectures, the latter truths; mixed they make a thing 
not so true as gospel, not so false as history — viz. fiction. 
. . . When I startle you think twice before you disbelieve 
me. Distrust rather my oily probabilities. They should 
be true, too, if I could make them so, but I can't. They are 
guesses." Or again, in The Charge of Plagiarism Refuted: 
^'Fiction is not lying, or pseudonymuncla would really find 
it as easy as they pretend. Let any man look into fiction 
scientifically and he will find all fiction worth a button is 
founded on fact, and it matters less than the unscientific 
suppose, whether those facts are gathered by personal 
experience, or by hearsay, or from the experience of others 
as recorded ... in printed record of fact." The sub-title 
of Hard Cash, ''A matter-of-fact romance," is defined as a 
''fiction built on truths — gathered by long, severe, and 
systematic labor from a" multitude "of sources — books 
and witnesses." Thus Reade contended that the novelist 
was not ready to produce younger than forty because he 
could not earlier have a sufficient mastery of fact; and then 
recalling that Dickens apparently offered an exception he 
promptly anticipates the retort by pointing out that a 
peculiarly hard experience of life had ripened Boz early. 
The method is the same whether the story like Hard Cash 
have an ulterior moral end, or like The Moonstone be pure 
mystification, or like The Cloister and the Hearth deal with 



138 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

the life of bygone times, the latter differing only in that it 
drives the novelist back almost exclusively to printed fact. 

'*I tell you," Reade goes on in the essay just mentioned, 
''this union of fact and imagination is a kind of intellectual 
copulation, and has procreated the best in fiction in every 
age, by a law of nature." Hence Dickens spends a season 
in Yorkshire before he draws the Squeers family and their 
estabhshment at Dotheboys Hall; Reade shuts himself up 
in Dedham Jail as preparation for the campaign against 
prison regimen in Never too Late; and Collins explores ''the 
dead house" which is to furnish capital for JezeheVs Daughter. 
Hence, Dickens's authorities for the spontaneous combustion 
of Krook; the assertion of precedents for the will that makes 
Noddy Boffin wealthy, and for that which gives rise to the 
chancery suit of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce; the defense of 
Jennings's strange experiment in The Moonstone, the declara- 
tion of physiological authority for the deaf mute Madonna 
in Hide and Seek, and the references to title and page for the 
occultism of The Two Destinies. This absolute and un- 
swerving devotion to attested fact stands in strange contrast 
to the procedure of Trollope, who declares that when he 
began with churchmen like Archdeacon Grantly and Bishop 
Proudie he was not even well acquainted with ecclesiastics. 

The reverence of the Dickensians for "fact" and their 
insistence upon it remind one of the impression of youthful- 
ness that David Copperfield made upon Steerforth's valet; 
and though it tends to reduce truth to fact and truth to art 
to one and the same thing — in Reade, surely the logical 
conclusion of the whole matter is that the vicarious ex- 
perience derived from books is hardly inferior to personal 
experience — it provides for the trio unanswerable justifica- 
tion for much that is garish, tasteless, and incredible; not 
only for the notorious spontaneous combustion of Krook, 
but for the miraculous operation which preserves Kate 



THE SCHOOL OF DICKENS 139 

Gaunt's life and for the visions and ghosts of The Haunted 
Hotel. This is the justification of the reader's faith. 

More than Dickens and CoUins, Reade has been regarded 
as the champion of fact as the only true source of fiction; 
for he not only championed it belligerently in half a dozen 
controversies, but made a kind of parade of his gigantic 
indexes and note books in the study at Albert Gate. Thus 
before his death his own report and that of visitors who 
were permitted to visit his curious laboratory, with its 
mirrors, its huge stock of clippings, and its wash baskets for 
waste paper, had made his method notorious. Because of 
this system critics have frequently aligned him with Defoe. 
The similarity is a superficial one, inasmuch as it totally 
disregards the sensationalism which characterized the 
Dickens group. It is this sensational method which ex- 
plains the radically different structure that they reared. 
Reliance upon fact made Defoe's lies read like truth; sen- 
sationalism made Reade's facts read like romantic lies. 
But Reade's devotion to the document is only slight exag- 
geration of an attitude in which the Dickens trio were 
essentially at one. If they applied their doctrine of fact 
childishly sometimes, it did doubtless foster new standards 
of verisimilitude for romance ; for narrative built upon such 
a system as this, which exalts melodrama to a cult, reaches 
back with one hand to Mrs. Radcliffe and her followers, but 
forward with the other to Zola and the naturalists. 

But the fashion of the fifties, with its growing predi- 
lection to the domestic, raised questions concerning such an 
attitude as Reade's and Collins's — notably that of the 
relative value of persons and plots. In the preface to The 
Woman in White, Collins anticipates objections which his 
insistence on drama seemingly implies as to characterization. 
His argument that the romance of the unusual necessitates 
no feebleness on that score follows: ''I have always held 



140 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of a work 
of fiction should be to tell a story; and I have never be- 
lieved that the novelist who properly performed the first 
condition of his art was in danger on that account of neglect- 
ing the delineation of character — for this plain reason, that 
the effect produced by any narrative of events is essentially 
dependent not on the events themselves, but on the human 
interest which is directly connected with them. It may 
be possible, in novel writing, to present characters without 
telling a story; but it is not possible to tell a story success- 
fully without presenting characters; their existence as 
recognizable realities being the sole condition on which the 
story can be effectively told." It is not difficult, then, to 
understand that Reade and Collins especially resented the 
growing popularity of domestic novels, for such fiction sought 
first of all truthful characters and considered plot almost 
negligible. 

Therefore, even though they ultimately compromised 
with the new tendency, their stories contain numerous 
contemptuous references to the type and the methods it 
encouraged. Mrs. Eyrecourt in The Black Robe breaks out: 
''A very remarkable novel, Stella, in the present state of 
light literature in England — a novel that actually tells a 
story. It's quite incredible, I know. Try the book." 
"Domestic, you are aware," says Reade in a footnote to 
Love me little, Love me long, "is Latin for tame. Ex. Domestic 
fowl, domestic drama, story of domestic interest or chronicle 
of small beer," To the end, even after he had taken a leaf 
out of Dickens's book and turned didactic, Collins persists 
in his emphasis upon plot. In the preface to Heart and 
Science, 1883, there is the weariness of vain protestation 
upon the same score. "The two qualities which hold the 
highest place, in your estimation," he tells the public, 
"are: Character and Humour. Incidents and dramatic 



THE SCHOOL OF DICKENS 141 

situations only occupy a second place in your favor. A 
novel that tells no story, or that blunders perpetually in 
telling a story — a novel so devoid of all sense of the dramatic 
side of life, that not even a theatrical thief can find anything 
to steal — will nevertheless be a work that wins (and keeps) 
your admiration if it has humour which dwells in your 
memory, and characters which enlarge the circle of your 
friends." 

Nor was this hostility unwarranted; for the partisans of 
the domestic join issue upon all the positions of Collins and 
Reade. Especially Trollope's contempt for the sensational 
school was as great as the sensation school's contempt for 
him. In the foreword to The Caxions Bulwer wrote: ''It is 
the first" novel ''in which man has been viewed less in his 
active relations with the world, than in his repose at his own 
hearth ; — in a word the greatest part of the canvas has been 
devoted to the completion of a simple family picture, and 
thus, in any appeal to the sympathies of the human heart, 
the common household affections occupy the place of those 
livelier and larger passions which usually (and not unjustly) 
arrogate the foreground in Romantic composition." In 
his Autobiography TroUope describes with unusual pith the 
recipe for Framley Parsonage, a story which ten years after 
The Caxtons appeared in Blackwood' s served as the opening 
serial for The Cornhill. "The story was thoroughly English. 
There was a little fox hunting and a little tuft-hunting, some 
Christian virtue and some Christian cant. There was no 
heroism and no villainy. There was much church but more 
love-making." 

To this substitution of "the common household affections" 
for Collins's strong passions of the drama, Trollope again 
makes a general addition in the seventh chapter of his 
Autobiography. "A novel," he declares, "should give a 
picture of common life enlivened by humour and sweetened 



142 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

by pathos. To make that picture worthy of attention the 
canvas should be crowded with real portraits." To this 
denial of those unusual incidents which Collins justifies 
for Basil, TroUope adds: ''To my thinking the plot is but the 
vehicle for all this; and when you have a vehicle without 
passengers, a story of mystery in which the agents never 
spring to life, you have but a wooden show." And so for 
his own practice he abjures mystery. In Barchester TowerSy 
when Eleanor Bold is sought by the ne'er-do-well Bertie 
Stanhope and by Mr. Slope, Bishop Proudie's oleaginous 
chaplain, the novelist declares that, scorning to have a 
secret from the reader about a favorite personage, he wishes 
it understood that his heroine is destined for neither fortune 
hunter. For ''whatever can be the worth of that solicitude 
which a peep into the third volume can utterly dissipate?" 
"Take the last chapter of my book, if you please . . .the 
story shall have lost none of its interest." This subordi^ 
nation of plot to persons found its most eloquent champion 
in George Eliot, the novelty of whose characters and methods 
was particularly obnoxious to Reade. At the beginning of 
Chapter 5 in Amos Barton, George Eliot answers the fancied 
objections of romance readers that her hero is commonplace 
— that he has no undetected crimes concealed in his breast 
and that he is not even in love. ''Eighty out of a hundred 
of your adult male fellow Britons returned in the last cen- 
sus . . . are simply men of complexions more or less muddy, 
whose conversation is more or less bald and disjointed. 
Yet these commonplace people — many of them — bear 
a conscience, and have felt the sublime promptings to do a 
painful duty; they have their unspoken sorrows and their 
sacred joys; their hearts have perhaps gone out toward 
their first born, and they have mourned over the irreclaim- 
able dead. Nay, is there not a pathos in their very insig- 
nificance — in our compassion of their dim and narrow 



THE SCHOOL OF DICKENS 143 

existence — with the glorious possibiUties of that human 
nature which they share. Depend upon it, you would gain 
unspeakably if you would learn with me some of the poetry 
and the pathos, some of the tragedy and the comedy, lying 
in the experience of a soul that looks out through dull gray 
eyes, and that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tones." 

Despite the misunderstandings in each party of the other's 
drift and emphasis, and beneath the acrimony of Trollope 
upon Dickens, Reade, and Collins, or of Reade upon Trol- 
lope and George Eliot, the essential differentiation between 
the groups is clear. In a word, it is plot versus character 
and humor; or, more accurately, a difference of emphasis 
upon them arising from differing narrative principles. Not 
less surely, for instance, would Anthony Trollope have denied 
the absence of sensationalism in his stories than Collins 
would have denied anything but an extreme care for truthful 
portraits in his. The sensation group piqued themselves 
upon the folk they called into being, and the domestic 
group believed as surely with Trollope in the sensational. 
Reade, in The Sham Sample Swindle, a reply to the charge 
that Foul Play is a plagiarism, discusses in detail the twenty- 
one persons of his story, declaring seven of them creations 
new to fiction. Trollope's Lizzie Eustace, the heroine of 
The Eustace Diamonds, a flirt, liar, and thief, who achieves 
the double theft of her own jewels, is hardly a less sensational 
character than Miss Gwilt, the adventuress in Armadale. 
The death of Maggie and Tom TuUiver is not less melo- 
dramatic than that of Mr. Carker. The essential difference 
— the real distinction of the sensational manner — is that 
the Dickens group, instead of subordinating such incident 
to character interest, affect it for its own sake. It con- 
stitutes an end of narrative in itself, and the story which 
lacks it is, to repeat Reade's phrase, but "a chronicle of 
small beer." 



144 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

Such were the main prepossessions of the melodramatists 
who wrote the most distinguished sensational narrative 
of Victorian times. Their material characteristically comes 
from contemporary life and involves the most exciting ad- 
ventures and the strongest passions in some measure for their 
own sake. There were, however, gradations of sensation- 
alism. Fundamentally it consisted in an extremely adven- 
turous story like Foul Play. As such it is merely the novel 
which exalts plot above character. This was Trollope's 
understanding of it. Usually, however, the adventurous 
meant the terrible, and hence the hideous motives of arson, 
adultery, bigamy, and murder emphasized by the Quarterly 
reviewer. In exploitation of illicit love as a theme, the 
Dickensians were not notable. Dickens himself carefully 
avoided it. Reade and Collins, maintaining the right to 
speak out as popular teachers, revealed in Armadale, A 
Terrible Temptation, and Griffith Gaunt sl tendency to follow 
the drift of sensational motives suggested earlier; but 
Rhoda Somerset in A Terrible Temptation, Miss Gwilt in 
Armadale, and Griffith's relations with two wives represent 
the only exploitation that even Victorian critics found in 
their tales. The proper antithesis to sensationalism is the 
domestic. 

In short the final distinction of the Dickens group was 
perhaps largely rhetorical. They insist upon elaborating 
the scene to its full emotional value. Endeavoring to make 
the story work by the collision of characters, they abjure 
psychological analysis. They justify startling, adventitious 
solutions of their plot difficulties. It can hardly be pre- 
tended that these are peculiarly individual principles of 
romantic narrative, or that, except in the stress upon dia- 
logue and upon certified fact, these principles announced 
anything unfamiliar to their own day. But the Dicken- 
sians were shrewd students of narrative methods who 



THE SCHOOL OF DICKENS 145 

specialized a certain manner, and wrought their melodrama 
more precisely than others to the taste of their generation. 
They made a creed of familiar romantic devices, and set 
their folk talking with a persistency not before attempted. 
The product they themselves liked to call "dramatic," 
partly as indication of their preference for a melodramatic 
story, partly as designation of a method which aimed more 
than had been customary in the English novel to accentuate 
the necessary mode of fiction for the stage. 

IV 

Connected with the theories and ideals just outlined there 
are two corollaries of importance. One has to do with some 
modifications of the dramatic scheme effected by the vogue 
of the domestic, the other with the influence of the dramatic 
scheme upon the typical novel-length. 

Between the time of Thackeray and Trollope and our 
own, realism, in the phrase of Professor Bliss Perry, has 
attained the habit of ''jumping the fences" of decency 
and restraint in subject matter. Just as in the prose romance 
of the first half -century the Newgate novel followed Waverley 
and The Bride of Lammermoor, so after The Last Chronicle 
of Barset came Hardy's Imaginative Woman and Jude the Ob- 
scure. Realism was no more static than the romance. Eng- 
lish realism sixty years ago had no dogma of detachment and 
no parallelism with experimental medicine. Trollope or 
Thackeray would have been equally surprised at such a prin- 
ciple as at the notion that they were not bound to tell an 
artificial tale. The realist indeed had a very intimate and 
personal interest in his fictitious children, and seldom or 
never, except in such a tour de force as Barry Lyndon, con- 
descended to be a mere reporter. Thackeray, perhaps the 
most disillusioned of the group, took small pains to conceal 



146 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

his contempt and hatred for Becky or "the old campaigner"; 
and Trollope's Autohiogra-phy shows that he was quite in 
love with such heroines of his as Eleanor Bold and Lucy 
Robarts. Indeed all that Tennyson intended to stigmatize 
in his phrase "the troughs of Zolaism" was notably absent 
from the realism of Thackeray, Trollope, and The Caxtons. 
Trollope's reiterated boast that his novels are peculiarly 
English holds true of his fellow realists'. They dealt with 
English life on English soil, accepting and reproducing 
often enough the smug complacency, the insular morality 
at which men like Reade and Collins were up in arms, and 
were little influenced through the great period by foreign 
models. The singular fact is that the unwholesomeness 
which the term realistic connotes in our own day is con- 
stantly near the surface in Griffith Gaunt, A Terrible Temp- 
tation, and Armadale, but almost entirely absent from The 
Caxtons, The Small House at Allington, or Middlemarch. 

Formally sensation romance as Dickens's followers wrote 
it was a transitional stage between the old time three-decker 
and the modern one-volume story. Although the success 
of Dickens's experiment with shilling pamphlet fiction and 
the currency of instalment literature generally spelled end 
sooner or later for the three-volume novel, it still remained 
almost the sine qua non in fiction — especially in the domes- 
tic type — through the great period. Reade alludes to this 
when in his auto-criticism of his two earliest novels he de- 
clares himself devoid of the "true oil of fiction." Among 
the novel-writing fraternity there was no secret about this 
requisite. In his Autobiography Trollope puts the difficulty 
with the utmost frankness. "In writing a novel the author 
soon becomes aware that a burden of many pages lies before 
him. Circumstances require that he should cover a certain 
and generally not very confined space. Short novels are 
not popular with readers generally. Critics often complain 



THE SCHOOL OF DICKENS 



14*^ 



of the ordinary length of novels — of the three volumes to 
which they are subjected; but few novels which have at- 
tained great success in England have been told in fewer 
pages. The novel-writer who sticks to novel-writing as his 
profession will certainly find that this burden of length is 
incumbent on him." How shall he meet it? Trollope 
protests against episodes, admitting, however, the precedent 
of Fielding and Cervantes as opposed to his own feeling that 
every word should be germane. His own solution runs 
thus: ''The painter suits the size of his canvas to his sub- 
ject, and must I in my art stretch my subject to my 
canvas? This undoubtedly must be done by the nov- 
elist; and if he will learn his business may be done without 
injury to his effect. He may not print different pictures on 
the same canvas, which he will do if he allows himself to 
wander away to matters outside his own story; but by 
studying the proportions of his work, he may teach himself 
so to tell his story that it shall naturally fall into the re- 
quired length. Though his story should be all one, yet it 
may have many parts. Though the plot itself may require 
but few characters, it may be so enlarged as to find its full 
development in many. There may be subsidiary plots which 
shall tend to the elucidation of the main story, and which 
will take their places as part of one and the same work — 
as there may be many figures on a canvas which shall not 
to the spectator seem to form themselves into separate 
pictures." 

In My Novel the same considerations give rise to a spirited 
dialogue between young Pisistratus and the amiable old 
pedant Austin Caxton. On the authority of Fielding, 
Austin favors the inclusion of explanatory, introductory 
chapters; but Mrs. Caxton and the young man — modern- 
ists both — object to writing which is designed only to be 
skipped. Austin goes on dogmatically that such a plan is 



148 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

necessary in that it is "the repose of the picture. Besides 
this usage gives you opportunity to explain what has gone 
before, or preface what is coming, or, since, as Fielding 
contends, some learning is necessary to this kind of his- 
torical composition, it allows you . . . the introduction of light 
and pleasant ornaments. At each flight in the terrace you 
may give the eye the relief of an urn or a statue. More- 
over, when so inclined, you create the proper pausing places 
for reflection; and complete by a separate yet harmonious 
ethical department, the design of the work, which is but a 
Mother Goose's tale if it does not embrace a general view 
of the thoughts and the actions of mankind." The grounds 
on which the art of divagation were based matter little. 
Learning that art, for the realist at least, was practically 
obligatory. 

Obviously to elaboration of this sort the dramatic scheme 
was opposed in principle and in effect. Even in the longer 
early novels, Dickens's accessory material never is permitted 
to embrace ''a general view of the thoughts and actions of 
mankind" as such. If he is not pushing on the story, he 
may be elaborating its pictorial effects but certainly not 
talking about the narrative or the people as one apart from 
them. And given his scheme of narrative it is worth noting 
that his unusual facility, his abandonment to the delinea- 
tions of eccentrics, could furnish full-length three-deckers 
for but twenty years. Only once after 1859 did he attempt 
full length; and then upon contemporary critics the book, 
Our Mutual Friend, made a very general impression of 
laboriousness. In The Charge of Plagiarism Refuted, Reade's 
reply to having appropriated for The Wandering Heir 
materials from Swift's verse, that novelist twice puts the 
matter of brevity very pointedly. ''Invention, labor, 
research and above all a close condensation to be found in 
few other living English novelists — all these qualities 



THE SCHOOL OF DICKENS 149 

combined have produced a strong yet finite story {The 
Wandering Heir) which has fallen like a little thunderbolt 
among the contes a dormir dehoui of garrulous mediocrity." 
Later in the same essay he recurs to Shilly-Shally, the play 
which he made from Trollope's Ralph the Heir without 
the novelist's consent. **Mr. Trollope wrote an admirable 
novel called Ralph the Heir. Eveiybody praised it, more or 
less; and nobody found a moral flaw in it; for there was 
none to be found. I saw gems in it that ought not to be 
lost to the British stage, so barren of English life, English 
characters, and English idioms. I dramatized and pro- 
duced it. Trollope condensed by Reade succeeded with 
the public by a law of art, which is as inevitable as the law 
of gravity." 

It is possible to make this matter of length more definite. 
The three-volume domestic novel of Victorian times ran 
up to 270,000 or 300,000 words. Most of Dickens before 
he changed his style of narrative in 1859 with A Tale of 
Two Cities is nearer the higher than the lower figure. Martin 
Chuzzlewit, Nicholas Nicklehy, Little Dorrit, Bleak House, 
and David Copper field are not far short of 300,000 words. 
The Caxtons and My Novel and What will he do with it reach 
practically the same length. Anthony Trollope's longer 
stories run between the same limits; Phineas Finn and The 
Small House at Allington are about 270,000. Orley Farm 
and The Last Chronicle of Barset are slightly over 300,000. 
Those of the Barsetshire tales not previously included are 
considerably shorter — Barchester Towers, Dr. Thome, and 
Framley Parsonage range from about 200,000 to 220,000. 
George Eliot worked toward the same bulk; Adam Bede 
is of about the same length as the Trollope group just cited; 
Felix Holt is slightly briefer than any of them. With 
Middlemarch and Deronda, however, she joined the 300,000- 
word class. Now the writers who profess the principles 



150 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

of the Dickens group have a herculean task to attain such 
proportions. As a matter of fact they never do attain them. 
Dickens himself, after 1859, as has been noted, never ap- 
proaches them again — except in Our Mutual Friend. A 
Tale of Two Cities, which he thought of especially as a tale 
of incident, is only about half as long as Martin Chuzzlewit 
and David Copperfield, and Great Expectations is something 
less than two thirds their length. As for Reade and Collins, 
though their stories appeared in three volumes uniformly 
enough, their average length is considerably less than that 
of the Dr. Thome group. Even the reformatory tales like 
It is Never too Late, and Put Yourself in his Place, after 
The Cloister and the Hearth Reade's most extended efforts, 
are considerably below the 250,000 mark. His more dis- 
tinctly sensational or domestic stories, say Foul Play and 
Love me little, scale down from 150,000, the length of A Tale 
of Two Cities. Collins's average is less than Reade's. 
The Moonstone, the most complicated of the mystery stories, 
has about 185,000; The New Magdalen is somewhat under 
120,000. 

Probably, therefore, the attribution of the generally 
loose and attenuated structure of the Victorian novel to 
eighteenth-century precedent, according to Mr. Caxton's 
suggestion, would be mistaken. Study of the market condi- 
tions through the second quarter of the century shows a liter- 
ature forming precedents rather than following them. The 
tendencies in the domestic novel against which the younger 
sensation writers, throughout their careers, and the master 
at the end of his, set their faces were inherent in the primary 
stress upon character and humor. The outrageous price 
fixed by Scott upon the three-volume novel made a short 
novel impossible while it remained. Not unreasonably 
purchasers demanded a sizable book as well as a readable - 
The instalment plan of publication, especially the shilling 



THE SCHOOL OF DICKENS 151 

pamphlet form, encouraged bulkiness and loose construction. 
The results of these conventions make clear the meaning of 
Collins's complaints against those novelists who fail to tell 
a story or blunder perpetually in doing so, and Reade's 
objection that George Eliot, after her kind, ''uses many 
words," whereas he after his kind uses few, or his opinion 
of the play he made without permission from Ralph the 
Heir that Trollope ''as condensed by Reade succeeded by a 
law of nature." Whether, absolutely speaking, the younger 
sensation writers elected the better or the worse rhetoric 
is little to our purpose; at all events their example was on 
the side of the formally defter workmanship which subse- 
quently prevailed in the one-volume story. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE NATIVE TRADITION OF TERRORISM IN THE 
ENGLISH NOVEL 

Foreword 

The derivation of the dramatic novel chiefly from tales 
about the Byronic hero implies not only that the narrative 
method of Dickens and his followers is essentially a native 
development unaltered by foreign models, but also that 
Scott's influence upon it was secondary. Neither general- 
ization can pass without notice. 

By the time that our triumvirate were writing, romance 
was no longer insular. We may recall the jibe of Mr. 
Punch when he promises that his forthcoming library of 
sensation stories shall utilize the best brains available, 
whether domestic or foreign; or the example of Harrison 
Ainsworth, who when Jack Sheppard proved as unpalatable 
as Rookwood had been, essayed in Old St. PauVs and The 
Tower of London to dramatize a place as Victor Hugo had 
done in Notre Dame. What the Dickens group, especially 
the younger men, may have owed to the elder Dumas, 
Eugene Sue, Victor Hugo, and the race of lesser novelists 
and playwrights whom the English sensation writers of the 
rank and file were generally understood to have pillaged, can 
scarcely be ignored. Reade's admiration for the author of 
Notre Dame was profound. "He is a god, sir," the eccen- 
tric novelist once remarked to Coleman, in an extravagance 
of praise which he approaches only in speaking of Scott and 

152 



TRADITION OF TERRORISM IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL 153 

of Dickens. Both Leslie Stephen and Swinburne have noted 
similarities between Charles Reade and Victor Hugo, and 
Swinburne in final judgment places the English novelist be- 
tween the author of Notre Dame and the author of The Wan- 
dering Jew. Balzac, on the contraiy, neither Reade nor 
Collins admitted to Parnassus. In a long review reprinted 
among My Miscellanies^ Collins obviously finds more interest 
in Balzac's improvident life than in his art as story-teller. 
In The Eighth Commandment Reade couples him with 
Fielding as "the least dramatic of novelists." Dependence 
upon French fiction of a kind Reade was certainly guilty 
of; French plays, which furnished the plots for Clouds and 
Sunshine, The Double Marriage, and Foul Play, he saw 
acted whenever he could, read constantly, and adapted for 
English playhouses and periodicals both with and without 
the consent of the original author. 

Yet upon our trio, jointly and separately, the influence 
of French models was relatively superficial "and clearly 
secondary. Essentially it is with English narrative tra- 
ditions that we have to do. Dickens's taste, as we know 
from a passage in David Copperfield, was formed upon a few 
English models. For a professional man of letters he was 
unusually little the student or even reader; and his rather 
complacent ignorance of more than mere literature was a 
stock subject of reproach by contemporary critics. More- 
over, Reade's addiction to French melodrama seems to 
have had utilitarian ends, for he clearly regarded it primarily 
as a repository of appropriable working ideas and themes. 
What Holinshed was to Shakespeare, French melodrama 
was to Charles Reade. Such an expression of his indebted- 
ness, we may fancy, would have gratified the novelist 
greatly. 

Further, the derivation of Dickens's dramatic novel 
mainly from stories of the Byronic hero means that Scott's 



154 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

influence upon him and his group was secondary. This 
opinion is by no means a denial of the priority of Scott's 
influence upon subsequent romance in general. But sensa- 
tionalism, as the school of Dickens employed it, is a peculiar 
province of romance with a specialized form. It consists 
essentially in delineation of the most terrible emotions 
and the acts which those emotions excite always in some 
measure because they are terrible. Its materials are villainy 
and crime. This predilection is clear enough historically 
from Mrs. Radcliffe's Italian to Katherine Cecil Thurston's 
Masquerader, and it has tinged the whole line, sometimes 
more, sometimes less, with a certain unwholesomeness. 
To point out that the bloodiest deed recorded in Quentin 
Durward of De la Marck or Tristan L'Hermite exhibits 
little or nothing of the rhetorical lingering w^hich character- 
izes say Bill Sikes's involuntary suicide or Carker's ghastly 
death is merely to be guilty of truism. Scott's persons and 
incidents are often potentially sensational enough. He 
was even adept at melodramatic effects; but the method 
and result differ essentially from sensationalism in the sense 
the word applies to the Dickens group because he never 
stresses these materials for their own sake. Sensational- 
ism preserves an attitude toward romance — a not alto- 
gether admirable one — which Scott almost entirely abjured. 
The superficial variations of this romance from the time of 
The Italian to that of Oliver Twist or Basil are many; but 
they are all clearly enough indicated in the career of the 
Byronic hero. He is always the central figure of a sensational 
melodrama; and to trace his history is to trace the rise of 
the method to which Dickens — in one aspect of his work — 
Collins, and Reade dedicated their powers. The "pro- 
toplastic ruffian's" career in English fiction is a stormy one, 
his metamorphoses numerous, his hold upon life almost 
incredibly tenacious. For something like half a century in 



TRADITION OF TERRORISM IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL 155 

various guises he continued shrilly to reiterate the favorite 
croak of Barnaby Rudgc's raven, 'Tm a devil," much 
to the disgust of sober reviewers, and much to the delight 
of the generality of readers. Long before Thackeray and 
the Fraserians ridiculed and scourged him off the stage, he 
had made himself the most logical personage in English 
letters to have uttered King Charles's famous apology. 
In the novel, the character itself is of less importance per- 
haps than the narrative rhetoric it fostered. 

It is the purpose of this chapter to trace the origins and 
vagaries of this spirit of romance through the work of the 
Dickensians. The material falls into three groups. The 
first has to do with the history of the Byronic hero as he 
affected narrative method in the novel down to mid-century ; 
the second aims to present the composite lineaments of the 
dramatic novel which Dickens and his group founded largely 
upon the rhetorical precedent developed by experimentation 
with the arch villain; the last discloses the means by which 
Reade, who was rhetorically the extremist in sensationalism, 
reduced the dramatic principles of the group almost to 
absurdity. 

9. The Byronic Hero 



It is ludicrously ironical that Ann Radcliffe, almost the 
one novelist of a loose-speaking time who piqued herself 
upon her propriety, should have given birth to the singularly 
disreputable "Byronic" hero. If the good lady could have 
foreseen the ruffianly progeny for which Schedoni, the 
protagonist of The Italian, was largely responsible, Emily 
St. Aubert's consternation before the famous picture which 
was no picture must have paled into insignificance before 
her own. Clearly, however, the monstrous rascal had a 
fascination for her, for in the three notable stories which 



156 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

preceded The lialian — The Sicilian Romance, The Romance 
of the Forest, and The Mysteries of Udolpho — there are 
unelaborated sketches of the figure for whom her last and 
best story was named. The most important of these antici- 
patory villains is Montoni of The Mysteries, who reveals 
the conception enlarging and developing. Montoni, an 
Italian adventurer, beguiles Emily St. Aubert's aunt, Mme. 
Cheron, into marriage in the belief that she is wealthy. 
Ascertaining his mistake about the lady's fortune too late, 
he takes off his wife and niece, the latter practically now his 
ward, to his ruinous castle, Udolpho, where he forcibly 
detains the young woman after his wife's death. The girl 
being heiress to considerable property, Montoni still hopes 
to end his hunt for fortune successfully by taking advantage 
of her situation. Ultimately he makes himself into a kind 
of bandit king and comes to an obscure and evil end. 

The portrait of the embryo Lara and Corsair is amateurish. 
More than once Montoni threatens to turn mere vulgar 
rascal upon his creator's hands without the single virtue 
linked to his thousand crimes. At Venice he almost de- 
generates into a mere gamester, and later at Udolpho he 
threatens to become mere voluptuary. He has the mis- 
fortune to be as clearly a woman's creation as Mr. Rochester 
and is about as credible as that gentleman. The burden 
of f rightfulness which the story imposes upon him is far too 
heavy, so that when he would be most terrible he generally 
provokes only a smile. He is positively frightened by 
M. Dupont's ventriloquism. When asked by Emily by 
what right he detains her at Udolpho, he clanks a sword, 
shoots forth a terrible glance, and declares that he does so 
''By the right of my will." 

Yet the saUent characteristics of the Byronic hero are 
already unmistakable. Montoni is saturnine, designing, 
inscrutable, inflexible, lawless, and his person and mind are 



TRADITION OF TERRORISM IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL 157 

plainly meant to convey the suggestion of the mysteriously 
criminal coupled with a commanding personality. ''His 
soul/' Mrs. Radcliffe says, ''was little susceptible to light 
pleasures. He delighted in the energies of the passions; 
the difficulties and tempests of life, which wreck the happi- 
ness of others, roused and strengthened all the powers of his 
mind and afforded him the highest enjoyments of which 
his nature was capable." Hence when Emily first meets 
him, she feels an admiration, "mixed with a degree of 
fear, she knew not exactly wherefore." The acquisition 
of the passion-seared face which connotes this evil genius 
was the final step in the finished portrait of the monk 
Schedoni. 

Schedoni, the Italian, is really a monk, who, having made 
way with his brother and forced the widow to marry him 
by the foulest of means imaginable, takes vows in order to 
provide himself with sanctuary. As the spiritual director 
of the Marchesa Vivaldi, he opposes her son's marriage with 
Ellena, in ignorance that the heroine is his own niece; and 
finally makes a compact with his patroness personally to 
dispatch the girl. As he is about to do so, he perceives a 
miniature in her possession which leads him to think her 
his own daughter. In pursuance of the Marchesa's scheme 
to prevent an unworthy marriage, Schedoni has involved 
young Vivaldi, the lover, with the Inquisition. The monk 
is caught in his own trap. The Holy Office ferreting out his 
crimes, he can escape a more ignominious death only by 
poisoning himself. 

Sir Walter Raleigh ^ indicates Byron's borrowing from 
Mrs. Radcliffe by a comparison between the novelist's 
sketch of Schedoni's features and a few lines from Lara. 
The still life portrait of the monk runs thus: "There was 
something terrible in his air, something almost superhuman. 
1 English Novel, pp. 229-230. 



158 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

His cowl, too, as it threw a shade over the Uvid features of 
his face, increased its severe character, and gave an effect 
to his large and melancholy eye which approached to horror. 
. . . There was something in his physiognomy extremely 
singular, and that cannot be easily defined. It bore traces 
of passions which seemed to have fixed the features they 
no longer animated. An habitual gloom and austerity 
prevailed over the deep lines of his countenance, and his 
eyes were so piercing that they seemed to penetrate at a 
single glance, into the hearts of men, and to read their most 
secret thoughts." As the counterpart in Byron, Professor 
Raleigh offers the lines: 

That brow in furrowed lines had fixed at last, 
And spake of passions, but of passions past; 

A high demeanor, and a glance that took 
Their thoughts from others by a single look; 

And some deep feeling it were vain to trace 
At moments lightened o'er his vivid face. 

The diabolical connotation of the Italian is more vividly 
indicated subsequently in the impression he leaves upon 
another's mind: "A dark malignity overspread the features 
of the monk, and at that moment Vivaldi thought he beheld 
a man whose passions might impel him to the perpetration 
of almost any crime, howsoever hideous. He recoiled from 
him as if he had suddenly seen a serpent in his path, yet stood 
gazing on his face, with an attention so wholly occupied 
as to be unconscious that he did so. It seemed as if the 
evil power once attributed to the eye of envious malice 
held him in fascination to the monk." The parallel cita- 
tions might equally well come from The Giaour, the first, 
as from Lara, one of the last of Byron's tales. The Giaour, 
the first of these oriental diabolicals, ends his days in a 
monastery, to the visitors of which he gives the impression — 



TRADITION OF TERRORISM IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL 159 

Dark and unearthly is the scowl 
That glares beneath his dusky cowl; 
The flash of that dilating eye 
Reveals too much of times gone by; 
Tho' varying, indistinct the hue 
Oft will his glance the gazer rue. 
For in it lurks that nameless spell 
Which speaks, itself unspeakable, 
A spirit yet unquell'd and high 
That claims and keeps ascendancy. 



and again 



If ever evil angel bore 

The form of mortal, such he wore. 



Beyond this superficial bond of sinister appearance there is 
the fact which presently becomes important that from 
Montoni through Lara the connotation of the villain is rather 
elaborately aristocratic. Schedoni's arrogance of place as 
a monk is hardly less than that of Conrad the pirate whose 
men are his slaves. The Byronic hero is more than an 
aristocrat; he is a despot. The remark that his sponsor 
as a member of Parliament was for the people, not of them, 
applies with equal justice to his heroes. There is nothing 
democratic in their isolation, egotism, and pride of position 
or of race, such as Turpin's familiarity with tapsters and 
hostlers, or Sheppard's association with common trulls. 
These romantic villains are consciously aloof, contemptuous 
of the rabble alike by their superiority of blood, might, and 
passion. But between Montoni and Lara there has been 
a transformation. The Radclifl&an figures are unmitigated 
ruffians, — one is suspected of wife murder; the other has 
achieved rape and fratricide. The final definiteness of the 
criminality in some measure vulgarizes them. Here Byron's 
tact was superior; for not only is his Giaour or Conrad 
a tempestuous lover, whose passion is thwarted, but Byron 
knew his effects too well to resolve the mysterious blackness 



160 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

that sits upon their brows. Conrad's thousand crimes are 
perhaps bloody annals of piracy and revenge; we are never 
told. The nature of the strange sin of Manfred still has 
interest for the curious-minded. The superior sentimental 
appeal of Byron is manifest — and in his day it proved that 
all the world loved the lover, even though he were a Conrad. 
. The forces, inherent and accidental, which made Conrad 
and his fellows an infectious example for the first four dec- 
ades of the century in English fiction, were more various 
than at first appears. Certainly they had more sensational 
qualifications than the phenomenally successful Waverley 
romances that shortly followed them. They were known 
to be the work of a young nobleman, a dangerous, mad, 
wicked young aristocrat; they were hailed by the reviewers 
as fascinating and shocking too; and before they had run 
their course there was a scandal about their picturesque 
young author that shook all England. Quite apart from the 
fact that they modified and reanimated a popular romantic 
figure, and always suggested self-portraiture of one of the 
most interesting men in Europe, they were admirably 
advertised by adventitious circumstances. How far Sir 
Walter Scott's words that he gave over writing verse ro- 
mances because Byron beat him are sober truth, how far 
the generous compliment of a courtly gentleman may be a 
question; but that Rhoderick Dhu or even Marmion paled 
before Conrad and Lara is indubitable. Marmion, indeed, 
is an obvious enough link between Schedoni and the Byronic 
group. Figures render most vividly the tremendous vogue 
of the tales; they brought Byron from £500 to £700 each, 
and sold phenomenally. Fourteen thousand copies of The 
Corsair — or more than double the number of copies of 
Waverley printed in six months — were taken in a single day. 
The stories themselves are terrific melodramas of love 
and crime, with one central character thinly disguised by 



TRADITION OF TERRORISM IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL 161 

little more than change of name. Under whatever name 
he appears he has suffered romantic wrongs which he has 
avenged, if so might be, in summary and frightful fashion; 
the Giaour ambushes and slays Hassan for revenging him- 
self upon his faithless mistress exactly as the Giaour would 
have done had conditions been reversed; Lara murders 
Sir Ezzelin because he threatens to make known that Con- 
rad the pirate and Lara the noble are one and the same, 
and casts the corpse into the river. Over his wrongs — not 
over his crimes — he broods with an intensity worthy a 
better cause. The striking countenance, seared by pas- 
sionate rumination which stamps upon it "too much of 
time gone by," is the counterpart of the terrible features 
of the diabolical Gothic protagonist — of Ambrosio and of 
Schedoni, just as the mysterious sorrows that afflict him 
are the counterpart of their demoniac possession. The 
mere conception of this barbaric, amorous hero, with his 
lawless passions, his unscrupulous hatred, and his eagerness 
for sanguinary revenge, thus not only implies crude melo- 
drama, but sets a premium upon it. The more terrible 
the violence, granted any adequate degree of literary skill, 
the more vividly successful the realization of the hero. 
But as the extravagance of the romantic spirit declined in 
the twenties and thirties, evil eye and demoniac possession 
became obnoxious themes to a public bent upon general 
education and political reform. Nevertheless, there re- 
mained eminently useful traits and themes in these tales 
of crime. Novelists were by no means ready to forego 
the sinister countenance, the isolation of spirit, the unchecked 
passions, and the proclivity to lawless love as Byron em- 
ployed them. The consequence in the adaptations is a 
certain ambiguity toward breaches of the civil or the 
moral law. 

It was Bulwer-Lytton, though he denied it stoutly, who 



162 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

was Lara's next great sponsor. The novelist was doubtless 
sincere enough when he not only disclaimed the allegiance, 
but even protested that he had done much to end the fashion 
Byron set. But the fashion Byron set was still very power- 
ful indeed in fiction when Bulwer began writing, and Bulwer 
himself was certainly the most susceptible of the Victorians 
to the varying demands of popular taste. In a long and 
prolific career, it is safe to say that he never disappointed 
or never molded it, though he often appeared to anticipate 
it. The example of Scott, which in a general way may be 
said to dominate historical romances like Devereux and 
Harold, clearly runs a poor second to that of Byron in the 
stories produced before Eugene Maltr avers. Indeed the recur- 
rence of episodes and characters which hark back to the 
Lara model is probably the most consistent recurrence in 
Bulwer's entire work. This influence is traceable as late as 
the Caxton series at mid-century in such episodes and 
persons as Darrell and his love affair, or Harley L' Estrange 
and his. From the earlier non-historical romances cer- 
tainly an obvious descendant of ''the protoplastic ruffian" 
is seldom absent, though it is not at all difficult to un- 
derstand that Lord Lytton, the conservative of mid-Vic- 
torian days, took little pride in young Bulwer's palpable 
fondness for the scandalous progeny of Lord Byron. Falk- 
land, in the early romance of that name, which the novelist 
suppressed; Pelham, the fob and coxcomb whose dandyism 
supposedly cloaks abilities amounting almost to genius; 
Reginald Glanville in the same story; William Brandon, 
the man of law in Paul Clifford; the aloof crime-crossed Aram; 
Ernest Maltravers in his amour with Alice — all belong 
to the Byronic clan, and could not possibly be what they are 
without the Schedoni-Corsair-Lara model. 

The general nature of Bulwer's adaptation appears with 
less complication than elsewhere perhaps in Falkland, 



TRADITION OF TERRORISM IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL 163 

the suppressed romance. Falkland, the son of an English 
father and a Spanish mother, though still young and irre- 
sistible, lives a retired and solitary life as the result of an 
unhappy love affair. Finally he meets Lady Emily Mande- 
ville, whom he ultimately persuades to fly with him. At 
the last moment her husband discovers the plan. In a 
paroxysm of passion and terror Lady Emily dies. Falkland, 
claimed by his Spanish kin in a fight for freedom, is finally 
entrapped and slain by the foe. The personality of the hero, 
the character of the passion, the romantic accessory of a 
fight for freedom — these show less originality than Bul- 
wer's other adaptations. The episode of Sir Richard 
Glanville in Pelham is more nearly typical of this novelist's 
general procedure. That nobleman takes to his hearth, 
without benefit of clergy, Gertrude Douglas, whom he loves 
romantically. Called away from their cottage by the illness 
of his mother, he later returns to find that his mistress has 
been brutally appropriated against her will by Tyrrell, an 
acquaintance of his. He follows Tyrrell to Paris, where in 
disguise he ruins his adversary at play, then discloses his 
identity and purpose. Finally Tyrrell is murdered under 
circumstances which point almost convincingly to Glan- 
ville's guilt. At the last moment he is proved innocent — 
a pleasant expedient whereby the reader obtains all the 
titillations that arise from the novel of crime, without 
wasting sympathy upon a murderer. Ultimately Glanville 
dies, blighted by unlucky love. 

Bulwer was no servile imitator; he simply made extensive 
capital out of the prevailing craze for a certain type of char- 
acter, just as Dickens ten or fifteen years later in Oliver 
Twist and Barnahy Rudge made capital out of Newgate 
novels. Bulwer domesticated this exotic Byronic person- 
age and began his moral regeneration. All the Byronic 
episodes and adaptations previously mentioned take place 



164 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

mainly on English soil with English actors. Moreover, 
the one virtue of Conrad has multiplied in Aram, Glanville, 
and Malt ravers, so that the trailing clouds of brimstone no 
longer oppress the atmosphere. Maltravers is platonist 
and poet; Aram, scholar and humanitarian; Glanville, 
one whose abilities might carry him to any height; Brandon, 
a judge who achieves the woolsack by sheer force of intellect; 
Darrell and Audrey Egerton, ministers of state. All are 
high-spirited, chivalrous gentlemen. Blighted and blight- 
ing love, in greater or less degree lawless, is the common 
experience of all. Maltravers and Glanville are more 
philosophical, if you will, than the Giaour and Conrad; 
but sincerity in love no less clearly in one case than the 
other takes precedence over the formalities of the marriage 
ceremony. According to its author, Aram was intended in 
rather more ambitious fashion to show how crime blighted 
the scholar's subsequent love for Madeline Lester. Brandon 
outwits his false wife and sells her as his paramour to be- 
come another's mistress. So too Bulwer preserves the 
aloof personality; and having shorn it of its genuine diab- 
olism, preserves even the physiognomy more or less closely 
— very closely in some sketches of Aram and Brandon, less 
so in Glanville and Maltravers. More particularly Bulwer's 
two romances of crime, Paul Clifford and Eugene Aram, 
the most famous perhaps of Newgate novels, reveal the 
Byronian hero in his final phase. These representative 
specimens make clear why and how Schedoni-Lara made his 
exit from the pages of the English novel. 

II 

The so-called Newgate romances are the final phase of the 
Schedoni-Lara-Aram kind of hero. Here, through an in- 
congruous addition of virtue, he degenerates first into a 



TRADITION OF TERRORISM IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL 165 

moral ambiguity and finally turns mere vulgar ruffian in the 
person of Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard or Whitehead's Jack 
Ketch. ''The Newgate novels," for present purposes, are 
those stories written mostly between 1830 and 1840 in which 
a distinguished criminal is the protagonist. They are a 
tentative, decadent romance owing something to Godwin's 
Caleb Williams, but more to Gothic diabolism and its modi- 
fications, and representing in prose fiction that want of 
earnestness and purpose which Professor Walker finds 
characteristic of early Victorianism. Here the decadent 
strain of the terrorists and of Byron still had potency enough 
to induce experimentation, but not sufficient vitality to 
inspire fiction of permanent worth. Rather oddly Bulwer's 
Paul Clifford, the reformatory tale in which Professor Caza- 
main finds the beginning of le Roman social, in a less praise- 
worthy aspect also opened a series of fictions taking their 
color from the tradition which has just been set forth. 
Paul Clifford was followed shortly by Eugene Aram and 
Whitehead's Autobiography of Jack Ketch. Ainsworth con- 
tributed Rookwood and Jack Sheppard. To the same 
appetite Borrow, Whitehead, and Macfarlane furnished 
biographical dictionaries of the whole fraternity of thieves, 
murderers, and freebooters. 

The new demands for a popular literature with which men 
like Constable and Knight were experimenting just prior to 
1830 make Newgate fiction anything but a surprising phe- 
nomenon. It is by no means certain that the bulk of stories 
of crime or of books dealing with it in an amusing way was 
greater proportionally between 1830 and 1840 than for a 
similar period earlier or later. Yet a variety of circumstances 
then served to make Paul Clifford, Eugene Aram, and 
their like peculiarly obnoxious and portentous. Democracy 
had enforced attention to popular education and amuse- 
ment. The popular press in the hands of Cobbett, Hone, 



166 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

and Hetherington had inculcated opinions that seemed sub- 
versive to conservative society. Many sober men who were 
not merely alarmists half feared another Terror, this time 
on English soil; and the great periodicals were anxiously 
debating the desirability, the objects, and methods of general 
education in almost every number. Moreover, this popular 
novel of crime for about ten years after Bulwer put out 
Paul Clifford was obviously no longer a vulgar, negligibly 
crude thing from the Minerva Press; for Bulwer then, 
indeed, seemed the most probable successor to Scott's fame 
and influence. Not altogether absurdly serious minds felt 
in these notorious tales of crime a menace to both art and 
society. 

Clearly Bulwer's two notorious romances of crime in- 
tended something far different from and superior to that 
which current criticism judged they attained. Paul Clifford 
was an onslaught upon the penal code; Eugene Aram, a 
tragedy of the scholar blighted by complicity in crime. 
The first named, declares its writer, was designed "to draw 
attention to two crimes in our penal institutions, viz., 
a vicious prison discipline and a sanguinary criminal code — 
the habit of corrupting the boy by the very punishment 
that ought to redeem him, and then hanging the man, at 
the first occasion, as the easiest way of getting rid of our 
blunders. Between the example of crime which the tyro 
learns in the prison yard, and the terrible levity with which 
the mob gather about the drop at Newgate, there is a con- 
nection which a writer may be pardoned for quitting loftier 
regions of imagination to trace and detect. So far the book 
is less a picture of the King's highway than the law's royal 
road to the gallows — a satire on the short cut established 
between the house of correction and the condemned cell." 
Incontestably the object which Bulwer set himself, sugges- 
tive of Reade's in It is Never too Late to Mend twentv-five 



TRADITION OF TERRORISM IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL 167 

years later, was worthy and significant; but the means by 
which his story is diverted in effect into a merry melodrama 
of outlawry are obvious enough. And the discrepancy 
between purpose and achievement affords a very fair measure 
of the power of the sensation tradition in 1830. 

The spectacle of the corruption of the young man's mind, 
which was incumbent on the novelist, if the pretended object 
of his fiction was to coincide with the real, is deliberately 
avoided; for Bulwer, knowing that the psychology of the 
situation was hardly the thing in 1830, brushed aside that 
paltry manner thus: ''We do not intend, reader, to indicate 
by broad colors, and in long detail, the moral deterioration 
of our hero; because we have found by experience that such 
pains on our part do little more than make the reader blame 
our stupidity instead of lauding our intention. We shall, 
therefore, only work out our moral by subtle hints and brief 
comments; and we shall now content ourselves with re- 
minding thee that hitherto thou hast seen Paul honest in the 
teeth of circumstances." And therewith fails entirely in any 
dramatic or moral sense the first onslaught on the penal 
system. The avowedly reformatory novelist gives us only 
his asseveration for the first half of his thesis. Truly Kings- 
ley and Reade did these things with more singleness of 
heart. 

It was to enforce the paradox, so troublesome to the 
young, Bulwer says, ''that, make what laws we please, the 
man who lives within the pale may be quite as bad as he who 
lives without," that the great melodramatic scene of the 
story was devised. Paul, the victim of social tyranny, is 
brought before the bar to be condemned by the wretch who 
cast off his mother; and the real villain, protected by his 
office and the approbation of the society that demands the 
victim's death, sits in judgment on the son whom his heart- 
lessness has made criminal. It is hardly to be wondered 



168 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

at that this strange collocation, in which the judge, an 
incorruptible in his official capacity, is also the favorite 
passion-seared Byronic hero in a domestic setting, and the 
criminal at the bar, a highwayman by deliberate choice, 
is the real gentleman and man of honor, proved troublesome 
to critics; for in this highly complex and artificial juxta- 
position of persons and traits, vice and virtue, as Thackeray 
later put it, are so inextricably mingled that it is impossible 
to distinguish one from the other. 

These palpable weaknesses of the novelist's presentation 
of his thesis — the deliberate avoidance of any serious repre- 
sentation of the corruption of Paul's mind in the prison 
yard, and the incongruous theatricality of the trial scene 
— tell but half the story of Bulwer's dalliance. Once into 
the story of Paul's deeds upon the highway, the professed 
preachment notwithstanding, Bulwer is no less the roman- 
ticist of crime than Maturin or Ains worth. The gusto and 
unction of the scene in which the hero robs Lord Mauleverer, 
with its stage business of Paul's coolness when his lordship 
essays to shoot him with a pistol from which it later tran- 
spires the outlaw has had the adroitness to draw the charge ; 
the humorous retaliation when Clifford threatens his victim 
with the entire contents of the pill box which the post boy 
carries for the distemper evident in his lordship's attempt 
at murder; the magnanimous refusal of the outlaw to share 
the plunder which one of Mauleverer's outriders has taken 
independently — all this is the romanticism of highway 
robbery, whatever serious moral purpose the design pro- 
fesses. Practically Bulwer is more concerned with the 
manufacture of a taking story in a then popular vein than 
with the influence of the penal code upon malefactors. To 
pretend that the tale is designed and written so as to make 
Clifford's defense before the court a summary of the essen- 
tial fortunes of the hero is idle; like Turpin in Rookwood, 



TRADITION OF TERRORISM IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL 169 

he is first and foremost a romantic gentleman of the road. 
The craft of the romancer is too fascinating for the purpose 
of the morahst; and the shifty point of view reveals the 
temporarily unavailing struggle of something deeper and 
more significant against the prevailing model of sensational 
romance. 

Eugene Aram illustrates the same transitional aspect of 
the novel of crime — the perpetuation of the terrific and the 
unavailing struggle to turn it into worthy channels, with the 
consequent moral ambiguity of the protagonist. Aranij 
indeed, was a favorite with its author, partly no doubt 
because the critics detected in it the wolf in sheep's clothing. 
In the first preface of 1831 Bulwer emphatically differen- 
tiated his tale from the current variety of Newgate novel. 
''The guilt of Aram," he declares, ^'m not that of the vulgar 
ruffian; it leads to views and considerations wholly distinct 
from those with which profligate knavery and brutal cruelty 
revolt and displease us in the literature of Newgate and the 
hulks. His crime does, in fact, belong to those startling 
paradoxes which the poetry of all countries, and especially 
of our own, has always delighted to contemplate and ex- 
amine. Whenever a crime appears the aberration and the 
monstrous product of a great intellect, or of a nature ordi- 
narily virtuous, it becomes not only the subject of genius, 
which deals with the passions, to describe; but a problem 
for philosophy, which deals with actions, to investigate 
and solve; — hence the Macbeths and Richards, the lagos 
and Othellos." The nature of the tragedy Bulwer aimed 
at in Aram is more explicitly stated in a later preface of 
1847. "The moral consisted in showing more than the 
mere legal punishment at the close. It was to show how 
the consciousness of the deed was to exclude whatever 
humanity of character preceded and belied it from all active 
exercise, all social confidence; how the knowledge of the 



170 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

bar between the minds of others and his own deprived the 
criminal of all motive to ambition, and blighted knowledge of 
all fruit. Miserable in his affections ; barren in his intellect; 
clinging to solitude yet accursed in it; dreading as a danger 
the fame that he had once coveted; obscure in spite of 
learning, hopeless in spite of love, fruitless and joyless in 
his life, calamitous and shameful in his end — surely such 
is no palliative of crime, no dalliance and toying with the 
grimness of evil ! And surely to any ordinary comprehension 
and candid mind such is the moral conveyed by the fiction 
of Eugene Aram." 

Nothing could be more admirable — or more nearly axiom- 
atic; the crime of the scholar viewed in this light assuredly 
has as much human interest and significance intrinsically as 
the guilt of Shakespeare's half-barbarous king or Moorish 
general. That Bulwer himself believed in his achievement 
of genuine tragedy must be inferred from a few words of his 
near the end of the story. "I have not sought to derive 
the reader's interest from the vulgar sources that such a tale 
might have afforded. I have suffered him almost from the 
beginning to pierce Aram's secret, and I have prepared him 
for that guilt with which other narrators of his story might 
have sought only to surprise." With such explicit state- 
ment of intent, Eugene Aram forcibly recalls a certain 
Roundabout Paper which was to have had the simplicity 
of Dr. Johnson and the deep feeling of Addison. The secret 
of Aram in a very real sense is preserved to the end for 
surprise. That he has been somehow criminal a reader is, 
as Bulwer contends, aware, though how is a mystery; and 
the reader watches the net being drawn closer and closer 
about the hero with exactly the same kind of curiosity, 
though perhaps not the same degree, that he feels in follow- 
ing the adventures of Raffles or of Sherlock Holmes. The 
superior nature of the tragic material as the novelist con- 



TRADITION OF TERRORISM IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL 171 

ceived his story, and "the problem" in the destruction of the 
miserable wretch Clarke, which might well have fascinated 
a latter-day realist, are subordinated to the current model of 
sensational stories. The real tragedy of the situation — 
the blight that falls upon the scholar as a result of complicity 
in murder — is as indistinct as in Paul Clifford is the presen- 
tation of the corrupting influence of the prison yard. The 
reaction upon Aram is never indicated from within; there 
is some mummery of broken sentences and not a Httle trite 
sketching of our familiar protoplastic ruffian — and about 
as much tragedy in any true sense of the word as in The 
Beggars^ Opera. We are never in possession of his thoughts 
and motives until we read the confession he wrote the day 
before his execution. Granted the difference between 
Aram's story and the average chronicle of Newgate upon 
which Bulwer so vigorously insists, it is finally a potential 
rather than actual difference; and the main reason again 
for the discrepancy is clearly the same as in Paul Clifford. 

Paul Clifford and Eugene Aram, with their moral ambi- 
guity and trifling, end a phase of Bulwer's career. When 
later he drew inspiration from crime or occultism, as in 
Lucreiia, Zanoni, and A Strange Story, not domesticated 
Byronism, but science through its romance in alchemy, 
astrology, and oriental magic are his sources. Nor are 
Ains worth's notorious Rookwood and Jack Sheppard, or 
Whitehead's once famous Autobiography of Jack Ketch 
significant of anything further here except as illustration of 
the extent and duration of the Newgate epidemic, which 
criticism in the complacent words of an old reviewer of 
Maturin found it high time to step forward and abate. 
From Rookwood, an avowed return to the model of Mrs. 
Radcliffe, and from Jack Sheppard diabolism of the Byronic 
caste is quite wanting. Turpin and Sheppard, as Ains worth 
draws them, purport to be nothing more than common 



172 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

clay. Jack Ketch likewise introduces a set of sordid rascals 
who justly make an end at Newgate or in the hulks. 

The novelists themselves were not altogether confident 
in offering such fictions to their public. We have noted 
Bulwer's insistence that Paul Clifford was not primarily 
a picture of the King's Highway and that Aram is no New- 
gate novel. Ainsworth's preface to Rookwood expressed 
a similar dubiety about Turpin. In a second preface to 
Paul Clifford, dated 1848, Bulwer reveals his revulsion from 
his Newgate stories, and pleads indulgence for the youthful 
mind which inspired the sentiments. "There is no immo- 
rality in a truth that enforces this question" (whether often- 
times, make what laws we will, the felon at the bar may not 
be a better man than his judge), "for it is precisely those 
offences which society cannot interfere with that society 
requires fiction to expose. Society is right, though youth 
is reluctant to admit it. Society can form only certain 
regulations necessary for its self-defence — the fewer the 
better — punish those who invade, leave unquestioned those 
who respect them. But fiction follows truth into all strong- 
holds of convention; strikes through the disguise, lifts the 
mask, bares the heart, and leaves a moral where it brands 
a falsehood. Out of this range of ideas the mind of the 
author has, perhaps, emerged into an atmosphere which he 
believes to be more congenial to art. But he can no more 
regret that he has passed through it, than he can regret 
that while he dwelt there his heart, like his years, was 
young. ..." Meantime, however, criticism was by no 
means slow in reprehending the Newgate fashion to which 
Paul Clifford and Eugene Aram had lent distinction. 

Bulwer rightly enough became the target of The Athenaeum 
and Eraser's, the two journals which arrogated to themselves 
the distinction of hounding out of popular favor the false 
sentiment and the obscuration of the Newgate novel. Under 



TRADITION OF TERRORISM IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL 173 

a sound demand for the rectification of the novehst's point 
of view in dealing with crime, the warfare, at least as it 
affected Bulwer, was a hilarious, blundering, scurrilous 
business, almost as much personal as critical. It was quite 
in accord with the tone of periodical controversy of the 
time and especially so with that of Captain Shandon and 
his satellites. The youthful flamboyancy of Bulwer's 
style, his connection with Colburn, his liberal politics, his 
dandyism — all offered ready targets at which the Frase- 
rians shot with considerable more glee than accuracy. The 
notice of Pelham, Devereux, and Paul Clifford in June, 1830, 
is far from being clear-headed or significant criticism; the 
reviewer wastes much energy in the attempt to discredit 
Bulwer's knowledge of Reid, whom the novelist had referred 
to in Devereux, and more in picking small flaws in the moti- 
vation of Paul Clifford. The purpose of the latter story is 
disregarded altogether, though elsewhere it is one of Regina's 
objections to the writer of Arajn that nothing that is is 
right. The good Tory journalists made serious objections 
to the satirical portraits of Eldon and Ellenborough as Old 
Bags and Long Ned, not on the grounds of their feebleness, 
but purely out of principle, just as the Heir of Redclyffe 
objected to any coloring of levity in remarks about his late- 
lamented majesty. King Charles I. It is significant that the 
hue and cry against the novel of crime does not begin here. 
The solid objection Fraser's sought against the showy 
yomig radical was provided by Eugene Aram a year later. 

The lampoons to which that novel subjected its author 
were followed by a sober review entitled A Good Tale Badly 
Told in the magazine for February, 1832. For the first 
time the reviewer formulates the objection to the novel of 
crime. He quotes Juvenal's Maxima debetur puero reverentia, 
and protests against ''this awakening of sympathy with 
interesting criminals, and wasting sensibility on the scaffold 



174 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

and the jails" — for "it is a modem, a depraved and a 
corrupting taste." Records, he contends, show that an 
unusual crime is always followed by a sequence of similar 
offenses. Pity and terror, therefore, are not to be called 
upon by the novelist indiscriminately. Nor does the work- 
manship suit the reviewer better than the subject. Bulwer's 
Dame Darkmans is only a copy from Scott. Unlike the 
weird sisters in Macbeth or the cronies in The Bride of Lam- 
mermoor, she is not terrible, but only disgusting. Finally 
there is objection to ''this renewed but feeble attempt to 
revive the stale practice of Bolingbroke, with injurious 
success, of combining everything venerable on earth with the 
ludicrous — of treating virtue and vice with equally con- 
temptuous indifference. " Voltaire and Rousseau, it is true^ 
had powers that enabled them for a while to carry off such 
attempts; ''but it is not for the imps of darkness to imitate 
the Anakims of Hell." 

The principle announced, war soon followed. In August 
and September Eraser's published a burlesque of Aram 
entitled Elizabeth Brownrigge, which has much extraneous in- 
terest, inasmuch as it is very likely Thackeray's. It is dedi- 
cated to the author of Eugene Aram by an unsuccessful 
hack who has learned by reading that story that his own 
failures have resulted from his having written novels ''just 
in character, interesting in plot, pathetic, imexceptionable in 
sentiment but unhappily — not of a popular description." 
The true popular vein is exhibited in Bulwer's story, which 
has taught the aspirant "to mix virtue and vice in such 
inextricable confusion as to render it impossible that any 
preference should be given to either, or that one, indeed^ 
should be at all distinguishable from the other." Bulwer^ 
the satirist goes on to say, is the true father of a new lusus 
naturae school — "Having to paint an adulterer you de- 
scribed him as belonging to the school of country curates, 



TRADITION OF TERRORISM IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL 175 

among whom, perhaps, such a criminal is not met with once 
in a hundred years. . . . Being in search of a tender- 
hearted . . . high-minded hero of romance you turned to 
the pages of the Newgate Calendar, and looked for him 
in the list of those who have cut throats for money, among 
whom a person in possession of such qualities could never 
have been met with at all. Wanting a shrewd, calculating 
valet you describe him as an old soldier, though he bears 
not a single trait of the character which might have been 
moulded by a long course of military service; but, on the 
contrary, is marked by all the distinguishing features of a 
bankrupt attorney or a lame duck from the stock exchange. 
Having to paint a cat you endow her with all the idiosyn- 
crasies of a dog." This is the true popular manner, and 
in a postscript to the tale itself the burlesquer offers to re- 
produce it in any number of three-volume novels that may 
be required. As for the burlesque itself, if it is by Thackeray, 
it is chiefly notable as showing how much he could improve 
upon it in the later travesty of the same novelist known as 
George de Barnwell. 

The cause against Newgate fiction had found a doughty 
champion in Thackeray; and, if the attribution of Fraserian 
articles on that topic by Swinburne and Mr. Benjamin be 
correct, an ever ready one. Both Swinburne and Mr. 
Benjamin are inclined to believe Thackeray the author of 
Elizabeth Brownrigge, and the latter also holds the same hand 
responsible for the review of Whitehead's Lives and Exploits 
of English. Highwaymen, Pirates, and Robbers in March, 1834; 
for Highways and Lowways, or AinswortKs Dictionary with 
Notes on Turpin, a review of Rookwood, June, 1834; and for 
Another Caw from Rookwood; or Turpin out Again, a review 
of the third edition of Ainsworth's story, April, 1836. What- 
ever the authorship of these, in such efforts as Catherine, 
Barry Lyndon, and George de Barnwell Thackeray certainly 



176 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

produced the only pieces upon the Newgate controversy 
which have claim to permanent intrinsic interest. The 
record of Thackeray's activity against it is substantially 
then the literary history of the episode. 

He assaulted the novel of crime generically again in 
Catherine, which appeared serially in Fraser's in 1839 and 
1840 as a specimen in which ''no man shall mistake virtue 
for vice, no man shall allow a single sentiment of pity or 
admiration to enter his bosom for any character in the piece, 
it being from beginning to end a scene of unmixed rascality, 
performed by persons who never deviate into good feeling." 
Catherine is an avowed rectijBcation of the method of Paul 
Clifford, Eugene Aram, Ernest Maltravers, Rookwood, Jack 
Sheppard, and Oliver Twist, all of which are specifically 
mentioned as terrible examples. For this purpose he fol- 
lowed custom by selecting an authentic Newgate record. 
The true story of Catherine Hayes and her murder of her 
husband, as told in Whitehead's Lives and Exploits, is one 
of the most hideous imaginable; and Thackeray's version 
by no means mitigates its hideousness. ''Cat" is a vulgar 
little drab, rescued from the almshouse by the owners of an 
inn to become their domestic drudge, who falls an easy prey 
to the soldierly person of a Prussian officer. While she is his 
mistress, they lead a cat and dog life. Deserted by her 
lover, Catherine marries a mean wretch named Hayes; 
and after a long time, when her first lover reappears as the 
wealthy attache of a foreign embassy, she plans the murder 
of her husband in order to be free for another amour with 
her Max. The crime is discovered and Catherine executed. 

This delectable bit of narrative purports to come from 
one Ikey Solomans, who thus apologizes for introducing 
characters who are utterly worthless. "In this we have 
consulted nature and history, rather than the prevailing 
taste and general manner of authors. The amusing novel 



TRADITION OF TERRORISM IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL 177 

of Ernest Maltravers, for instance, opens with a seduction; 
but then it is performed by people of the strictest virtue 
on both sides; and there is so much rehgion and philosophy 
in the heart of the seducer, so much tender innocence in the 
soul of the seduced, that — bless the little dears — their 
very peccadilles make one interested in them; and their 
naughtiness becomes quite sacred, so deliciously is it de- 
scribed. Now if we are to be interested in rascally actions, 
let us have them with plain faces, and let them be performed, 
not by virtuous philosophers, but by rascals. Another clever 
class of novelists adopt the contrary system, and create 
interest by making their rascals perform virtuous actions. 
Against these popular plans we here solemnly appeal. We 
say, let your rogues in novels act like rogues, and your 
honest men like honest men; don't let us have any juggling 
and thimblerigging with virtue and vice, so that at the end 
of three volumes the bewildered reader shall not know 
which is which; don't let us find ourselves kindling at the 
generous qualities of thieves, and sympathizing with the ras- 
calities of noble hearts. For our part, we know what the 
public likes, and have chosen rogues for our characters, and 
have taken a story from The Newgate Calendar which we 
hope to follow out to edification. Among the rogues, at 
least, we will have nothing that shall be mistaken for virtues. 
And if the British public (after calling for three or four 
editions) shall give up, not only our rascals, but the rascals 
of all other authors, we shall be content — we shall apply 
to Government for a pension, and think that our duty is 
done." 

When Barry Lyndon, a serial for Fraser^s in 1844, and 
George de Barnwell, a contribution to Punch in 1847, were 
written, critical opprobrium had long since forced Ainsworth 
and Bulwer to relinquish criminal romance. Properly 
speaking, these efforts hardly belong to the critical contro- 



178 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

versy. Thackeray had long ago achieved the object of his 
campaign; but he probably felt that Catherine was too 
purely temporary and journalistic in its appeal, and designed 
Barry as an effort in carrying out the principles he had 
preached. Its workmanship, critics have generally agreed, 
is not inferior to that of Esmond. Almost equally brilliant 
is the burlesque George de Barnwell. The appropriation of 
Lillo's title, augmented by a de in memory of Bulwer's 
fashionable novel Pelham, provides the proper connotation 
for a wholesale satire of the absurdities and obliquities of the 
early Bulwerian romance. From the grandiloquent mean- 
inglessness of the opening sentence to the benevolent Fuz- 
wig's last gentle corrective to the condemned George — 
''The Tragedy of Tomorrow will teach the world that 
Homicide is not to be permitted even to the most amiable 
Genius, and that the lover of the Ideal and the Beautiful, 
as thou art, my son, must respect the Real, likewise" — the 
likeness never fails, the point never dulls. The pseudo- 
lyrical twaddle of the prologue; the first display of the future 
murderer as a grocer's boy ecstatically reading Homer in 
the original behind his counter while an impatient customer 
clamors for a half-penny-worth of tea dust; his entry through 
robbing the till into the polite world where he beats Addison 
both at toping and at writing numbers for The Spectator, 
suggests an emendation for Pope's Homer, caps Dean Swift's 
verses, and impresses the Secretary for Foreign Affairs 
with his intimate knowledge of French language and politics; 
the ruminating defense in the condemned cell for ridding the 
world of a man whose soul "never had a feeling for the Truth- 
ful and the Beautiful" comprise a composite of the extrava- 
gance, pretentiousness, and cant of Pelham, Devereux, Paul 
Clifford, and Eugene Aram so like that it might readily pass 
for skillful paste and scissors work upon them. 

From 1830 to 1840, already mundane enough. The New- 



TRADITION OF TERRORISM IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL 179 

gate Novel reveals a triviality and obscuration in the narra- 
tive presentation of crime arising in part from deference to 
a decaying popular romanticism, in part from the want of 
satisfactory models and serious object. It fed an unwhole- 
some taste which the times made rampant by reliance upon 
a decadent tradition, and minimized the axiom as to the 
wages of sin. Aram, Turpin, and Jack Sheppard are grudg- 
ingly turned over to Jack Ketch in the end; but ''the last 
indignity of the law," to quote Bulwer's euphemism for the 
execution of Eugene Aram, is typically only a mischance 
which puts an end to the adventures of an attractive scamp. 
It reveals not a soul caught in the meshes of crime, but a 
bandit who is the soul of honor, or a murderer so kindly 
that he turns aside rather than crush a worm. Parody 
and savage derision from the reviewers undoubtedly has- 
tened the passing of this maudlin, ambiguous sentimentality; 
new and better impulses — the eccentric portraits by Dick- 
ens, the services which the novelists perceived their medium 
might be made to afford in reform, the growing tendency 
toward domestic fiction — must soon have suppressed it 
regardless. Again it altered in ways which it is not our 
business here to follow. What, for example, Poe may have 
owed it, how Bulwer altered and adopted it in Zanoni and 
A Strange Story, ''are interesting questions, and not past all 
conjecture." This novel of demons, housebreakers, hang- 
men, highwaymen, and murderers did foster a serviceable 
method — that of the accented melodrama of the school 
of Dickens, the high achievement of Victorian sensation 
fiction. 

In Oliver Twist, with its Fagin, Nancy, and Bill Sikes, in 
Barnaby Rudge, with its episode of the hunted murderer, 
in Wilkie CoUins's Basil, with its diabolical Mannion, and 
in It is Never too Late to Mend, with its entire narrative of 
Tom Robinson, the pickpocket, the indebtedness of the 



180 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

Dickens group in their early successes to the story of crime 
is apparent. Thackeray, it will be remembered, found the 
kinship of Oliver Twist with that disreputable fiction suffi- 
ciently unmistakable to include the story for especial repre- 
hension in Catherine. The relationship in Barnaby, as in 
Oliver Twist, is very simple. Barnaby was written under the 
most trying conditions imaginable. Its author was under 
contract to Bentley at the time to produce three full-length 
novels. Barnaby Rudge, a piece of task work, naturally 
then, shows indebtedness to the current popular model; 
one has only to read the introduction of the murderer Rudge 
at the Varden inn or the final scene between him and Mr. 
Haredale to comprehend the models upon which Dickens 
worked. 

The preface to Oliver Twist puts beyond all doubt its 
derivation from the tradition of diabolism and ruffianism. 
Its professed theme is the hideousness of crime; a theme 
in which the writer clearly thought of himself as a reformer 
of degenerate romance. After a passing reference to the 
strictures made upon Oliver when it was appearing in periodi- 
cal form, Dickens proceeds to justify himself exactly upon 
the grounds of the rectified point of view. Having found 
in all books of his acquaintance which deal with the criminal 
that ''certain allurements and fascination are thrown about" 
him, he believed that to draw ''a knot of such associates . . . 
as really do exist; to paint them in all their deformity, 
in all their wretchedness; to show them as they really are, 
forever skulking uneasily through the dirtiest paths of fife, 
with the great black ghastly gallows closing up their pros- 
pect," was to attempt something greatly needed in art. 
Then, glancing at the squeamishness of novel readers gener- 
ally, he remarks: ''It is wonderful how Virtue turns from 
dirty stockings; and how Vice, married to ribbons and a 
little gay attire, changes her name, as wedded ladies do, 



TRADITION OF TERRORISM IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL 181 

and becomes Uomance." That he or his followers owed 
anything considerable to so despicable a set of fictions as 
they would have felt the Newgate novels to be, they would 
probably have denied stoutly; but the Newgate novel, 
as the descendant of the diabolical in earlier romance, 
encouraged and perpetuated a narrative method — the 
melodramatic method of terrific effects consciously wrought 
for their own sake. It was a way — it was the way — of 
telling a story of adventure, no matter whether the setting 
were the wretched garret of Fagin, the King's Highway, or 
the comfortable, well ordered home from which Rachel 
Verinder's oriental jewel disappeared. 

Its materials were transitory and shifting. The main 
transitions of its fashion in materials are not difficult to 
date approximately; by 1820 or 1830 the supernatural had 
practically expired; by 1840 the Fraserians had practically 
hooted the decadent Byronism of Newgate novels off the 
stage; at about the same time, the rise of Dickens closed 
the ascendancy of historical novels after the fashion of 
Scott. But the method for better or worse remained a 
permanent possession of the novelist, and one that for obvious 
reasons can never for long fall into disuse. 

10. The Common Characteristics of the Dickensians 
as Sensationalists 

Dramatic fiction, as Dickens's followers were fond of 
designating their melodrama, was thus subjected to several 
influences. Something it owed to the sensational tradition 
stretching back to Mrs. Radcliffe and the Gothicists, some- 
thing to the group's common devotion to the theater, and 
something to the practice of serial writing. From the novel- 
ists' own utterances it is apparent that the term signifies 
both a method and a kind of material. It is avowedly a 



182 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

romance of the here and now, based upon unusual but 
attested fact, and distinguished, Uke all sensationalism from 
the time of the terrorists, by a preference for the strongest 
emotions that men know or can conceive. Method wise 
it is notable for repudiation of the dissective quality which 
is a property of the writer, not of his fictitious personages, 
and for the admission of extraordinary solutions of plot 
difficulties. 

From the high selectiveness inherent in such a scheme of 
narrative it necessarily follows that each effort requires and 
exhausts a relatively rare, dynamic idea. A Trollope may 
dog Plantagenet Palliser through half a dozen three-volume 
tales from early boyhood to old age. George Eliot will find 
a recompense in delineation of the dull gray soul mainly 
for its undistinguished neutral color; but the dramatic 
novelist's scheme burns material with a profusion none but 
the prolific can afford. The romancer who is fortunate 
enough to hit upon the idea of Peg Woffington, the woman 
of many lovers taken by the unpracticed country gentleman, 
whose unsophistication is the key to his success; or upon 
that of The Moonstone, in which nervous excitement and a 
surreptitious dose of opium produce an unfathomable mys- 
tery, can never recur to it or to any recognizable variation 
of it. It is among the things that are achieved and con- 
cluded. Fifteen years ago, when M. Rostand's romantic 
comedies were fascinating theater-goers, Henry James con- 
cluded a review of them with the advice that the author of 
Cyrano come over and join the realists; for, says he, how 
long can M. Rostand go on fishing out of the romantic sea 
conceptions such as the tragic contrast between Cyrano's 
hideous nose and his poet's soul, or such as that between 
the aspirations of the young man born in the shadow of 
a great name and his environment? Realism is surer, 
Henry James concludes; and what, if Rostand would but 



TRADITION OF TERRORISM IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL 183 

see the light, could he not do with ingenuity and style such 
as his! Reade and Collins were keenly aware of the diffi- 
culty. In Hard Cash Reade makes the eccentric Dr. Samp- 
son rebuke current fiction as '^unidead melodrams for 
unidead girls"; and in A Terrible Temptation he pointedly 
distinguishes his own from the generality of novels because 
they are, in his favorite word, '^idead." He told his Ameri- 
can publishers that ''the public goes for a book with a 
feature." So Collins reiterates the purpose in Poor Miss 
Finch, say, of extending his studies in fiction; a recurring 
expression in his prefaces by which he calls attention to the 
variety of ''ideas" upon which his own melodramas are 
founded. 

This constant experimentation necessitated by the melo- 
dramatic creed appears clearly even in a rough list of Collins's 
themes. Basil dealt with a man's marriage to an unworthy 
woman; Hide and Seek exploited the deaf mute Madonna 
as heroine; The Dead Secret, The Woman in White, and The 
Moonstone were studies in mystification on slightly different 
plans; No Name depicted the struggles of a girl, gently 
reared, upon the legitimacy of whose birth doubts are 
suddenly cast; Armadale presented the adventuress at full 
length; Man and Wife attacked Scotch marriage laws and 
athletics in the Universities; The New Magdalen portrayed 
the wronged woman's effort to regain footing in society; 
Poor Miss Finch drew the blind girl according to fact; 
The Law and the Lady demonstrated the evils latent in the 
Scotch verdict ''not proven"; Jezebel's Daughter centered 
in a poisoner possessing the secrets of the Borgias; The 
Black Robe dealt with the machinations of the Jesuits upon 
wealthy Englishmen; The Two Destinies was based upon 
telepathy, and Heart and Science attempted to demonstrate 
the insufficiency of science to develop humanity or humane- 
ness. No Victorian perhaps had a better right to the dis- 



184 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

tinction which Bulwer Uked to claim — that of interesting 
through a constant, studied variety — than ColUns. 

His "brother in the art" was scarcely less varied. Peg 
Woffingion was the ideal presentment of the great actress 
and her contemporaries on the stage; Christie Johnstone , 
a realistic study of the Scotch fisher folk; Never too Late to 
Mend, an assault upon the prison system; Hard Cash 
another upon the asylums; The Cloister and the Hearth, 
a panorama of Renaissance Europe; Love me little, Love me 
long, a domestic story portraying what Mr. Howells calls 
"the coquette manquee'^ in Lucy Fountain; Griffith Gaunt, 
a psychological study of jealousy cast in outrageously 
sensational form; A Terrible Temptatio7i, the story of a 
family feud, involving the metropolitan auctioneers and 
builders, and exploiting the kept mistress; A Simpleton, 
the evils of tight lacing; and A Woman Hater, the misogy- 
nist's capitulation to the opera-singer. Reade, in fact, 
even when jaded and least himself, as in The Wandering 
Heir or The Woman Hater, had always fished in what Henry 
James calls the romantic sea to some purpose. The notion 
of an heiress who travels across seas and upon another 
continent in male costume, or of the woman hater who 
finally takes to wife the stage woman, savors little enough 
of inspiration, no doubt; but Dickensian melodrama abounds 
in conceptions more banal. The typical Readean idea was 
a thesis, and however much it might be distorted by reckless 
enthusiasm, the dynamic idea was almost invariably there. 

Dickens's themes hardly reveal the combined flamboy- 
ancy and novelty that are apparent in Reade and in 
Collins. Such conceptions as that of The Old Curiosity 
Shop, in which a little girl becomes the guardian spirit of 
a senile gamester, or that in Great Expectations, in which 
a wretched orphan boy befriends a convict who in turn sets 
up the lad as a gentleman in London, are not representa- 



TRADITION OF TERRORISM IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL 185 

tive. Generally, the excitements in Dickens's stories 
appear less desperately and laboriously studied than those 
in Foul Play or The Moonstone. Usually he is nearer hfe 
than his followers and more representative of it, no matter 
how realists like Gissing and Mr. Howells may reprehend 
his unreality. He descended to banalities often enough: 
his satelUtes hardly condescended to human probabilities. 
The reason for the difference perhaps is that whereas 
Dickens had amassed a huge stock of useful sensational 
material from observation and experience, ColHns and 
Reade must needs go farther afield. If the elder novelist 
chose to write about the murder in Seven Dials or the 
strangled baby found in the band box at the Picadilly 
Circus, he was not obliged to eak out his plot, as Reade 
with his indexes did, by means of newspaper reports of 
crime and violence from the ends of the earth. The 
novelty of Reade 's melodrama and of Colhn's resided in 
their laboratory method; the skill of Dickens's, in the 
facility and fertility of incident, the comic business, and 
the decorative description of his scene. 

The pattern which each dramatic novelist evolved from 
this central doctrine of strong passions pictorially represented 
had distinctive individuality. In general terms the Dicken- 
sian recipe from Oliver Twist to Edwin Drood was melodrama 
plus grotesque and humorous character elaboration. These 
ingredients are, however, by no means constant in their 
proportions. After 1859, when the labors of over twenty 
busy years demanded a conservation of his powers, Dickens 
set about devising ''stories of incident." This is the phrase 
he chose to describe A Tale of Two Cities. Examination of 
the four novels written between that time and his death 
reveals a considerable diminution in bulk. Our Mutual 
Friend being the only one to approximate the conventional 
three- volume length. This reduction has been achieved, not 



186 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

by the entire elimination of ''character parts/' — for Mrs. 
Gargery, Cruncher, and ''the aggerawayter," with her 
untimely prayers, are off the same piece as Mrs. Gamp and 
Captain Cuttle — but by the subordination of the eccentrics 
to a stricter narrative unity. Dickens and his favorite 
pupil Collins are changing places. Dickens writes The 
Mystery of Edwin Drood, and Collins, the past master of 
mystery stories, writes Man and Wife, a reformatory tale 
with a double thesis. In general down to 1859 a novel by 
Dickens consists of a loosely constructed melodrama or 
two,^ and exuberantly garrulous scenes for characters 
ad libitum. 

4 The younger men have nothing to parallel the inimitable's 
grotesques. Collins, structurally the greatest master, deals 
with a single unified plot, all the ramifications of which are 
so carefully exhausted as to reduce his persons to automata. 
Only occasionally in Bishopriggs, the rascally serving man in 
Man and Wife, in Hester Dethridge of the same story, 
in Gabriel Betterton, the servant of the Verinders in The 
Moonstone, and in Count Fosco does he rise above this 
limitation. His unique narrative mastery appears strik- 
ingly in Man and Wife, an unnoticed tour de force hardly 
less notable in its way than Barry Lyndon. In this reforma- 
tory tale, which Swinburne ranks next to the two great 
mystery stories, Collins employs the stage nomenclature 
of which he was fond. It is divided into prologue, epilogue, 
and sixteen scenes, each of which observes the necessary 
stage condition of being enacted in a single place. Its 
mechanics may not reveal imaginative genius, but it is 

^ Barnaby Rudge is practically a double melodrama consisting of the 
Haredale murder story, a modernized tale of terror, and the Joe and 
Dolly Varden story. In Bleak House Jarndyce and Jarndyce give 
loose connection to several stories including that of Rick and Ada, 
Esther's love story, and the banal tragedy in "high life" of Lady 
Dedlock. 



TRADITION OF TERRORISM IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL 187 

perfectly safe to say that none of Collins 's contemporaries 
could have constructed it. In contrast to Collins's elabo- 
rately exhaustive unity, Reade's typical scheme consists 
in the compression of several melodramas between two 
covers. More than any of his fellows he aimed at swift- 
ness, compression, and frequent startling dramatic effects, 
his ideal apparently being to impart a distinct thrill to every 
chapter. There are two consequences of this effort; among 
important English novelists there is perhaps none who 
equals Reade in celerity and in the quick succession of emo- 
tional thunder claps; again, in order to attain the con- 
ventional three-volume length, he is forced to rely not upon 
one strand for plot, like Collins, but upon several.^ 

There is another notable difference between Collins and 
Reade. The latter's vigorously masculine mind found no 
interest in mysteries which experience cannot resolve. He 
abominated the unintelligible with all the fervor of men in 
the age of prose and reason. His plots, therefore, from 
Peg Woffington to A Perilous Secret are all essentially straight- 
forward, obvious, physical melodrama. The occult of The 
Two Destinies, the fatalism of Armadale, and the ghastly 
supernaturalism of The Haunted Hotel his unspeculative 
mind never dallied with. His thrills and horrors are honest, 
mundane thrills and horrors based upon gunpowder, flood 
and storm, pirates and fights against odds such as Gerard's 
and Deny's in the old French inn, or Henry Little's in the old 
Cairnhope church. He makes none of that demand upon the 
reader's faith of which Collins speaks in his preface to Basil, 
but sticks to the stock agencies. His melodrama aims at 
the matter-of-fact intelligence of the gallery gods and never 
can puzzle them. 

^ Never too Late comprises three stories; Hard Cash, two; Put 
Yourself in his Place, two. Others, except The Cloister and the Hearth, 
do not attain the conventional length. 



188 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

Underneath these minor divergences of temper and 
pattern stand the common and characteristic devices of 
their sensationaUsm, notably the preference for strong 
passions because they are strong passions, which found 
expression in 1800 in Terrorism, and a century later in 
shilling-shockers; and also a deliberately external method 
in character delineation here consciously and deliberately 
adhered to as the preferable way of telling a story. Col- 
lins's failure in the latter, it will be recalled, was Dickens's 
single source of quarrel with The Woman in White. Reade 
reiterates the same principle in both Love me little, Love me 
long and Griffith Gaunt. In two words, if the expressed 
opinions of the Dickens group have meaning at all, they 
imply intensity for its own sake and externality of method. 
More concretely still, intensity means the extraction of the 
last possible emotional thrill; externality, avoidance of 
psychological dissection, in favor of a representation of 
persons in an unusual degree by means of gestures, words, 
and acts. The dramatic novel is thus a novel of coarse, 
strong effects, drawn in black and white with few neutral 
tints, and so bristling with sensationalism that the reader 
is never meant to see out of its romantic bamboozlement. 
Making 'em laugh, cry, and wait was for the Dickensians 
the quintessence of "the cheap yet ravishing delight" which 
Reade defined fiction to consist in. A momentary glance 
at Griffith Gaunt and Romola serves to illustrate the char- 
acteristic differences between them and the realist group. 
Both tales deal with the alienation of husband and wife; 
but the very opening of Reade's story, with its snatch of 
sensational dialogue, is sufficient index of the garishness to 
come. Here duels, bitter domestic quarrels, drowning, 
a woman pleading her own case in trial for murder, and 
bigamy are the mainsprings of the action. Set off against 
these the subtle steps in the disaffection of Romola and 



TRADITION OF TERRORISM IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL 189 

Tito. The wronged wife gives the key in her remark that 
''harsh words between those who have loved are hideous/' 
and so the tragedy develops in silence through the quieter 
agencies of the unexplained coat of mail beneath Tito's 
doublet, the sale of the old scholar's library, which senti- 
ment should have preserved, Romola's knowledge of her 
husband's relations with another woman, and the presence 
of the mysteriously dependent old man, Tito's unacknowl- 
edged father. 

The dramatic group's method as illustrated in Griffith 
Gaunt has continued to be a steady point of attack for 
lovers of realism from Thackeray's time. Mr. Howells, for 
instance, cites as typical of Dickens's theatricality Nance's 
death at the hands of Sikes and the scene between Edith 
Dombey and Carker at the French inn. His comparative 
judgment of Boz and Reade is that both are of the theater, 
but that the yoimger is of the better theater. Mr. Dawson, 
a critic with less animus against melodrama, notes that 
Reade is forever ringing down the curtain upon a climax. 
From one point of view Mr. Howell's comparison holds, 
from another it does not. Reade 's unparalleled prodigality 
of this effect has been illustrated previously. As to rhetoric 
Mr. Howells is quite correct. "The mawkish," Reade 
truly declares in Hard Cash, ''is a branch of literature I 
have resolutely avoided"; and the rhetorical excesses of 
the passages Mr. Howells cited were certainly quite foreign 
to the Readean vein. Collins with equal truth might have 
pleaded the same exemption. 

Surprise, coincidence, fortuitous retribution — these over- 
insistent characteristics of the dramatic novel in its high 
spots have largely discredited its narrative art in our own 
day of more sophisticated methods. Gissing, a thorough 
Dickensian, remarks of coincidences in Dickens, that, down 
to the time of Bleak House, "It never seems to have occurred 



190 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

to him thus far in his career, that novels and fairy tales 
(or his favourite Arabian Nights) should obey different laws 
in matter of incident";^ and the judgment holds good for 
Our Mutual Friend, the last of the full-length novels. That 
this is typical of the group is apparent enough. In Never 
too Late read the scene in which George Fielding returns 
from Australia just in time to prevent his sweetheart's 
entrance into the church in order to marry his villainous 
rival, or in Foul Play the way in which Wylie, who scuttled 
the Proserpine, hides his blood-money in the one room in 
London in which there is the man with the motive and the 
means for tracing those bank notes. The plots for Foul Play, 
Griffith Gaunt, and Poor Miss Finch involve coincident 
circumstances which affect the whole story. In the first, 
Penfold, condemned for forgery, takes service as ticket-of- 
leave man with the father of the girl who is in love with the 
forger whose crime transported him. In Griffith Gaunt and 
in Collins's story each hero has a double, Readers serving 
to bring Mrs. Gaunt to trial for murder, Collins's to com- 
plicate an almost incredible love story. The dictum that 
the contrived story led Dickens into melodrama is reversible. 
Upon the showing of precept and example, admiration for 
melodrama was a prime reason for the Dickensian's prefer- 
ence for the contrived story. 

In nothing perhaps is their determination to put human 
emotions to the rack more apparent than in their excessive 
use of fortuitous retribution. Before hmning the ghastly 
sketch of Quilp's corpse washed about in the muddy tide, 
Dickens remarked: '' Retribution, which often travels 
slowly, especially when heaviest, had tracked his footsteps 
with a sure and certain scent and was gaining on him fast. 
Unmindful of her stealthy tread, her victim holds his course 
in fancied triumph. Still at his heels she comes, and once 
^ Charles Dickens, A Critical Study, p. 69. 



TRADITION OF TERRORISM IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL 191 

afoot is never turned aside." Generally enough indeed the 
emotional pace of the dramatic novel is so tremendous 
that mere human agencies are feeble, and Heaven is invoked 
to smite the wicked. Quilp and Steerforth are drowned; 
Bill Sikes is an involuntary suicide; Rigaud Blandois is 
crushed to death in a falling building; Carker is ground to 
atoms by a railway train; Mme. Defarge is disposed of by 
an accidental discharge of a pistol; Sir John Chester's 
wickedness exacts the life of the son, as does Ralph Nickelby's 
ignoble revenge upon Nicholas. Readers and Collins's 
lists are hardly less formidable. Mention has been made 
of the infuriated sailor in Foul Play whose attack upon 
Helen RoUeston is swiftly punished by making him food for 
the sharks. Coventry, the rascal in Put Yourself in his 
Place, suffers paralysis; Seveme in The Woman Hater 
drops dead; Wardlaw, the forger in Foul Play, becomes 
an incurable maniac; Mannion, the diabolical enemy of 
Basil, ends his malignant pursuit of that young man by 
falling from the cliffs into the ocean. In Heart and Science 
3L coincident discovery of the medical secret upon which he 
has labored for years leads Benjulia the vivisectionist to a 
ghastly suicide. By coincidence, also, Delama>Ti's over- 
devotion to athletics brings down the long-threatened paraly- 
sis at the moment he is about to become a wife murderer. 
In Armadale, the adventuress, caught in her own gin, is the 
victim of poison intended for another. 

These exactions of the moral order in terms of the charnel 
house were not intended merely as dexterously manipulated, 
crude horrors. They illustrate an eternal verity — if we 
accept, as the Dickensians did, Collins's preference for those 
imusual events that happen to but few of us. It is a coin- 
cidence in which we are to see the hand of providence that 
Steerforth's dead body is cast up on the Yarmouth sands 
in sight of the home he had dishonored. The fate of Bill 



192 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

Sikes, of Delamayn, and of Wardlaw represents the same 
intervention. When Reade's forger is smitten with incur- 
able mania, Penfold, his hero, is made to remark: *'I have 
not forgotten who said 'Vengeance is mine' ''; God's still in 
his Heaven and all's right; and shall He not visibly take a 
hand in punishing the Severns and Ben Julias whose crimes 
human justice visits so weakly? That He should do so 
was not less in accord with the Dickensians' narrative art 
than with their theology. The fact that all this was good 
theology, indeed, made it good narrative art. Indeed there 
are no novelists so ''moral" as these Victorian sensationalists, 
unless it be the dime novelist, who is descended from them. 

The doctrine of strong passions pictorially represented 
results in a characteristic difference in incident between 
the dramatic and the realistic group. Trollope, as has been 
indicated, expressed the opinion that fiction should abound 
in sensationalism, and illustrated it copiously enough in 
practice. Phineas Finn, the Irish Member, fights a romantic 
duel and is involved in a mysterious murder. Lizzie Eustace, 
in The Eustace Diamonds, after stealing her own jewels, 
plays very interestingly at hide and seek with the police. 
Vavasour and Grey, the rivals for the heroine's favor in 
Can you forgive her? engage in a shooting affray. But this 
sensationalism, according to Trollope's ideal, is always 
subordinate to character interest. Moreover, as he makes 
one of his heroines remark, in words that are expressive 
of the realistic attitude before the example of George Eliot 
was greatly heeded, "I shall never go beyond genteel com- 
edy." " Genteel comedy " avoids, of all things, melodramatic 
heroics. John Eames, Becky, and Pendennis are sworn to 
no romantic-dramatic creed, and their creators are apt to 
dash their protagonists' finest efforts with an unheroic spice 
of the ludicrous and ironical. Poor Pen cuts a sorry figure 
before his lady-love in an altercation with an amorous 



TRADITION OF TERRORISM IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL 193 

cook. Johnnie Eames is shamefaced about his great exploit 
of thrashing the man who jilted Lily Dale. John Grey, 
with all romantic right upon his side, sets about throwing 
Vavasour, the miserable sponger on his sweetheart's fortune, 
out of his chambers; but the result is a very equivocal 
triumph — a very imperfect realization of heroism and 
poetic justice — when Grey, badly tousled and bruised, 
discovers that his late adversaiy's hat has been left behind 
in the scuffle. The last touch of the ludicrous comes when 
Grey casts the hat into the hall below, where his enemy 
is still spluttering and menacing. It is not thus that 
Nicholas or Henry Little emerges from a fight. 

Nicholas resents Sir Mulberry Hawk's light use of Kate 
Nickleby's name with a riding whip, laying open the rake's 
cheek from eye to mouth. For good measure, Sir Mulberry's 
bolting horse throws him and breaks the master's leg. 
When we hear of Sir Mulberry again he is confined to his 
chair, ''with a shattered limb, a body severely bruised, and 
a face disfigured by half -healed scars." When Mr. Merdle, 
the high financier of Little Dorrit, commits suicide at the 
baths, the pen knife he employed is prominently displayed, 
as is the vivid blood stain against the white enamel. So 
after Mr. Carker has stepped in front of the oncoming express, 
we see the sniffing dogs being driven from the fragments 
of flesh and bone, and the operatives drying the pool with 
a train of ashes. The realists offer tolerably close paral- 
lels for these incidents. Like Mr. Merdle, Melmoth in 
Trollope's The Way We Live Now is a financier whose 
forgeries end in suicide. Like Nicholas, John Eames chas- 
tises a man for shameful mistreatment of a woman ; and like 
Carker, Lopez, another Trollopian protagonist, is ground 
to death beneath a railway train. Melmoth, whose vil- 
lainies are as egregious as Merdle's, goes home like a decent 
burgess when the game is plaj^ed out and discreetly makes 



194 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

an end with prussic acid. A line suffices. Johnnie Eames, 
not less ashamed of than elated by his prowess in blackening 
the dastardly Crosbie's eyes, suffers some very human 
qualms in fear of the bobbies and the police court. Lopez 
is crushed to *'a thousand atoms" at the Ten way Junction; 
but there is no spectacle of dogs sniffing blood, nor of 
workmen ostentatiously scattering ashes. The circumstan- 
tiality of Dickens's rhetoric and its utter abandon his satel- 
lites did not copy. Reade never dawdled over his terrific 
effects. His distinction, however, is in brevity rather than 
in reticence, like the brutal curtness of the description of the 
injured workman in Put Yourself in his Place as ''a bag of 
grease and bones." In taste Collins 's rhetoric was superior 
to his master's also; but the unforgettable parts of Collins's 
novels — both persons and scenes — are studies in the 
grotesque and terrible; in persons such as Hester Deth- 
ridge and Count Fosco; in scenes such as that of Rosa 
Spearman beside the shaking sand-flats, the ghastly death 
of Ben Julia, and the laboratory episode of Armadale. 

Not only was the dramatic method particularly insistent 
upon realizing the full emotional value of the incident; it 
was also external by choice. The practice of presenting 
character primarily from within was the peculiar contri- 
bution of George Eliot; and was in a sense undeveloped 
before her. It will be recalled that Bulwer in Paul Clifford 
deliberately rejected the psychological reactions where they 
were essential to any complete or vital exposition of his 
thesis upon the grounds that readers found them dull. In 
one way then the deliberate externality of the Dickensian 
group was reactionary and looked backward, though with 
the essential difference that such procedure was part of a 
deliberate creed of art. There were two tendencies in the 
style of fiction corresponding to the two main ideals of its 
purpose — that of drawing ''real portraits," in Trollope's 



TRADITION OF TERRORISM IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL 195 

phrase, and that of presenting strong passions dramatically. 
The two extremes are George EUot and Charles Reade. 
The plain tendency among the realists is to gravitate toward 
the method of Daniel Deronda, let us say, where George 
Eliot's preoccupation with mental processes begins to over- 
shadow other considerations; among the dramatic group 
toward the method of Peg Woffington, a novel consisting of 
the dialogue of a stage piece slightly elaborated. 

Almost any one of the emotional scenes from Dickens 
that have been mentioned — those from Oliver Twist, the 
quarrel between husband and wife in Domhey & Son, or 
Mrs. Dombey's dismissal of Carker — illustrate this charac- 
teristic differentiation. The double drowning near the end 
of Our Mutual Friend suggests an enlightening parallel in 
George Eliot. Rogue Riderhood, who for purposes of black- 
mail, has quietly possessed himself of proof of Bradley Head- 
stone's brutal assault on Wraybum, has called the young 
man to the weir to make known the terms of silence. Not 
a significant change of attitude in either actor is allowed to go 
unrecorded. The rising insolence of the rogue as he smokes 
his pipe, the rising voice, the contemptuous snapping of his 
fingers, the momentary vehemence of his ''I'll be paid!" 
the growing desperation of the victim from the time of his 
contemptuous laugh at the gross demand for his watch, 
the white tenseness of his face as he begins to realize the 
extent of Riderhood's demands and the certainty of power 
to enforce them, his clutch with one hand upon the other's 
wrist, the final fixedness of despair represented by the night 
vigil in the window beside the lock — all this is significant 
not only because it is elaborately exact, but because it is 
the sole means of indicating Headstone's mental progression. 
Here is a man ultimately driven to murder and self-destruc- 
tion; yet what goes on behind the words and gestures 
it was contrary to the dramatic method to reveal. In short, 



196 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

more than other novelists of their time the Dickens group 
elected to impose on themselves something approximating 
the necessary restrictions of the spoken drama. For them 
it was a badly told story that got itself clogged with com- 
mentary. Their business was to visualize their scene, to 
report it undecorated by exposition, as we should see it in 
life. It has for us the same puzzlement as to its meaning, 
its bearing on the intrigue that any chance conversation 
might have. ''The story must stand for itself" was a 
principle that Dickens insisted upon repeatedly. This 
principle coincides with Reade's, that the chit chat must in- 
dicate his characters just as it does in real life, and his 
repeated objection to analysis of motive as interrupting 
the course of the sacred narrative and blurring the physical 
outline of his picture. 

The drowning of Grandcourt in Daniel Deronda through 
Gwendolen's hesitation in offering assistance is "a. fertile 
situation" such as the Dickensians especially affected, the 
presentation of which is the plain reverse of their methods. 
The outward action — the drama — of the catastrophe, to 
George Eliot is nothing. So insignificant is her interest in the 
outcome of Gwendolen's evil marriage as pictorial that she 
does not even attempt to visualize it. On the wharves, spec- 
tators observe that there has been an accident in the English 
milord's boat and that there is a body overboard — whether 
of man or woman they cannot tell. The importance appears 
only in a subsequent chapter when Gwendolen confesses to 
Deronda that in intent she is a murderess. It is only the 
hesitation, the crime in thought, and its ultimate reaction 
upon the heroine that matter. 

The essential differences inherent in these two theories 
of fiction may be seen and felt in these parallel citations 
from Daniel Deronda and Griffith Gaunt. The husband, 
suspecting Gwendolen's desire to talk privately, determines 



TRADITION OF TERRORISM IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL 197 

to circumvent her. She has rejected his proposal for boat- 
ing. '^ Presently Grandcourt came in with his hat on, but 
threw it off and sat down sideways on a chair nearly in 
front of her, saying in his superficial drawl, — 

'''Have you come round yet? or do you find it agree- 
able to be out of temper? You make things uncommonly 
pleasant for me.' 

'"Why do you want to make them unpleasant for mef^ 
said Gwendolen, getting helpless again, and feeling the hot 
tears rise. 

'"Now, will you be good enough to say what it is you 
have to complain of?' said Grandcourt, looking into her 
eyes, and using his most inward voice. 'Is it that I stay 
indoors when you stay ? ' 

"She could give no answer. The sort of truth that made 
any excuse for her anger could not be uttered. In the con- 
flict of despair and humiliation she began to sob, and the 
tears rolled down her cheeks, — a form of agitation which 
she had never shown before in her husband's presence. 

"'I hope this is useful,' said Grandcourt, after a moment 
or two. 'All I can say is, it's most confoundedly unpleasant. 
What the devil a woman can see in this kind of thing, I 
don't know. You see something to be got by it of course. 
All I can see is, that we shall be shut up here when we might 
have been having a pleasant sail.' 

'"Let us go, then,' said Gwendolen, impetuously. 'Per- 
haps we shall be drowned.' She began to sob again. 

"This extraordinary behavior, which had evidently some 
relation to Deronda, gave more definiteness to Grandcourt's 
conclusions. He drew his chair quite close in front of her, 
and said in a low tone, 'Just be quiet and listen, will you? ' 

"There seemed to be a magical effect in this close vicinity. 
Gwendolen shrank, and ceased to sob. She kept her eye- 
lids down and clasped her hands tightly. 



198 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

"'Let US understand each other,' said Grandcourt, in 
the same tone. ' I know very well what this nonsense means. 
But if you suppose I am going to let you make a fool of me, 
just dismiss that notion from your mind. What are you 
looking forward to, if you can't behave properly as my 
wife? There is disgrace for you, if you like to have it, but 
I don't know anything else; and as to Deronda, it's quite 
clear that he hangs back from you.' 

'''It is all false!' said Gwendolen, bitterly. 'You don't 
in the least imagine what is in my mind. I have seen 
enough of the disgrace that comes in that way. And you 
had better leave me at liberty to speak with any one I like. 
It would be better for you.' 

"'You will allow me to judge of that,' said Grandcourt, 
rising and moving to a little distance towards the window, 
but standing there playing v/ith his whiskers as if he were 
awaiting something. 

"Gwendolen's words had so clear and tremendous a 
meaning for herself that she thought they must have ex- 
pressed it to Grandcourt, and had no sooner uttered them 
than she dreaded their effect. But his soul was garrisoned 
against presentiments and fears; he had the courage and 
confidence that belong to domination, and he was feeling 
at that moment perfectly satisfied that he held his wife 
with bit and bridle. By the time they had been married 
a year she would cease to be restive. He continued stand- 
ing with his air of indifference, till she felt her habitual 
stifling consciousness of having an immovable obstruction 
in her life, like the nightmare of beholding a single form 
that serves to arrest all passage though the wide country 
lies open. 

"'What decision have you come to?' he said presently, 
looking at her. 'What orders shall I give?' 

"'Oh, let us go,' said Gwendolen. The walls had begun 



TRADITION OF TERRORISM IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL 199 

to be an imprisonment, and while there was breath in this 
man he would have the mastery over her. His words had 
the power of thumb-screws and the cold touch of the rack. 
To resist was to act like a stupid animal unable to measure 
results. So the boat was ordered. ..." 



Griffith Gaunt, returning home after long absence result- 
ing from a quarrel, finds his wife entertaining guests at 
dinner. Their covert reproofs to each other are enough to 
disperse the company shortly. Then — 

"'What sort of a reception was that you gave me?' 

"This was too much. She turned on him furiously. 
' Too good for thee, thou heartless creature. Thomas 
Leicester is here and I know thee for a villain.' 

"'You know nothing,' cried Griffith. 'Would you believe 
that mischief-making knave? What hath he told you? ' 

"'Go back to her,' cried Mrs. Gaunt furiously. 'Me 
you can deceive and pillage no more. So, this was your 
jealousy ! False and forsworn yourself, you dared to suspect 
and insult me. Ah ! and you think I am a woman to endure 
this? I'll have your life for it! I'll have your life.' 

"'Griffith endeavored to soften her; protested that, 
notwithstanding appearances, he had never loved but her. 

"'I'll soon be rid of you, and your love,' said the raging 
woman. 'The constables shall come for you to-morrow. 
You have seen how I can love, you shall know now how 
I can hate.' 

"She then, in her fury, poured out a torrent of reproaches 
and threats that made his blood run cold. He could not 
answer her; he had suspected her wrongfully, and been 
false to her himself. He had abused her generosity and 
taken her money for Mercy Vint. 

"After one or two vain efforts to check the torrent, he 
sank into his chair, and hid his face in his hands. 



200 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

"But this did not disarm her, at the time. Her raging 
voice and raging words were heard by the very servants, 
long after he had ceased to defend himself. 

''At last she came out, pale with fury, and finding Ryder 
near the door shrieked out, 'Take that reptile to his den, 
if he is mean enough to He in this house' ; then, lowering her 
voice, 'and bring Thomas Leicester to me.'" 

Such at its best were the lineaments of the sensationalism 
which half a century ago held spellbound the readers of popu- 
lar periodicals. It called for a tale of violent passions and 
relied particularly upon melodramatic devices of mystery, 
surprise, coincidence, and fortuitous intervention. More 
than other fiction of the time its makers tended voluntarily 
to observe some of the restrictions which the playwright's 
medium necessitates — notably avoidance of psychological 
analysis of motive and reaction — and to conduct the story 
largely by means of dialogue. It was a rarefied romance 
with a specialized narrative technique. Vividness, vigor, 
rapidity it promoted. To the modern taste the vividness 
often seems garishness; the vigor, rant. But the method 
could hardly fail to teach even those who cared little for its 
characteristic romance materials how to devise and accent 
the scene. Even TroUope, who, as a maker of novels, 
despised Dickens's school root and branch, confesses as 
much. How much popular melodramatists since have 
learned especially from Dickens cannot be determined. 
Undoubtedly it is much. Moreover, in the ultimate re- 
pudiation of the conventional three-volume length, this 
sensational novel pointed the way to a briefer, more work- 
manlike story. The preoccupation with plot, together 
with the deliberately external treatment of the dramatis 
personae, tended to sketchiness and indistinctness of char- 
acter. This is most apparent in the work of the younger 
men whose persons are but too easily forgotten when one 



TRADITION OF TERRORISM IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL 201 

closes the book. In the Dickensians relics of terrorism, 
the theater, and the new passion for fact of a sort — the 
unusual fact — met and intermingled ; and the result was, 
perhaps, the golden age of the dime novel. 

Jl. Readers Reduction of Sensation Principles 
to Absurdity 

The style which Charles Reade evolved from the funda- 
mental sensation-dramatic creed, like his singular genius, 
was unique. In the theater his friend Coleman observed 
that "despite Reade's elaborate theories of art, he was only 
guided by actual practical results." ''I have frequently 
known him," Coleman proceeds, ''take grave exceptions to 
an actor's conception of a part at rehearsal; but if the 
offender struck fire at night, the end justified the means, 
even if his views were diametrically opposed to those of 
the author." Still, as it has been sufficiently indicated that 
''effect first" is the general canon of sensational novels from 
Gothicism onward, to distinguish the trait in Reade is 
merely to align him with the tradition in general. He was, 
in fact, an extremist. His narrative rhetoric represents the 
culmination in Victorian times of the doctrines represented 
by the dramatic group, just as George Eliot's later manner 
represents the culmination of the realists' tendencies. This 
antithesis mainly explains Reade's absurd antipathy to the 
author of Daniel Deronda. 

In Dr. Thome there is a lover's quarrel between Mary 
and Frank Greshani, for the rather prosy style of which 
Trollope apologizes as follows: "Were I possessed of a 
quick, spasmodic style, I should have been able to include 
all — Frank's misbehavior, Mary's immediate anger, Au- 
gusta's arrival and keen Argus-eyed inspection, and then 
Mary's subsequent misery — in five words and half a dozen 
dashes. The thing should have been told so." It was one 



202 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

of Reade's distinctions that he could tell the thing so. "The 
truth is," he remarks in Hard Cash, ''that epics, dramas, 
novels ... all narrative, true or fictitious, except those, 
true or fictitious, which nobody reads, abridge the uninter- 
esting facts as nature never did, and dwell as nature never 
did upon the interesting ones."^ His workmanship was 
unique among Victorians because from Peg Woffington to 
A Perilous Secret he resolutely practiced condensation. The 
burlesque creed of Punch's prospectus for The Sensation 
Novel Company, Limited, in so far as it relates to narrative 
method, is Reade's serious code. Believing that narrative 
effects hit hardest when put in the fewest words possible 
and the plainest, he made all else subordinate to the purpose 
of getting on with his incident, and studied brevity and 
picturesqueness . 

How unusual a distinction of style in Victorian fiction 
this is will readily be perceived from what has preceded. 
Most novelists, indeed, were so well content to follow Trol- 
lope's practice of making their story fit the three-volume 
convention that a study of the methods of dilution and 
divagation among the great Victorians would be worthy 
a place among the curious essays of Disraeli the elder. 
Nor was brevity especially sought by Reade's own group: 
Dickens, whatever else he was, was a garrulous sentimen- 
talist, most so assuredly in his most dramatic moments; 
Collins wrote an exact but pedestrian style which seldom 
struck sparks out of his elaborately analyzed materials. In 
the interest of the qualities Reade sought, that energetic 
novelist reduced his stories as far as possible to dialogue, 
minimized set description and analysis of motive, made 
a fetich of employing the Saxon vocabulary, and defied 
printer's conventions right and left. As a result he never 
dawdled over — nor spared — the most terrific effects. 
' Hard Cash, Vol. II, ch. XVI. 



TRADITION OF TERRORISM IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL 203 

Between Peg Woffington and It is Never too Late to Mend — 
somewhere, that is, in the first five years of the second half- 
century, while he was still dramatic hack to Tom Taylor — 
Reade was evolving the principles of fiction which he prac- 
ticed to the end. There are numerous entries in his journal 
for the period intervening between the first experimental 
tale and the first great hit, none of which perhaps has more 
meaning than this: ''When in a novel you find yourself 
about to say something, pull up and ask — can't I make one 
of my dramatis personae say it? If you can, always do." ^ 
This emphasis on the spoken word, particularly in the 
younger men of the dramatic trio, has not quite escaped 
attention. Something of the care they expended upon, 
and of the importance they attached to it, Sir Walter Besant 
perceived when Collins in his last illness turned over to him 
for completion the story. Blind Love.^ Wilkie's notes, his 
collaborator affirms, were a complete, detailed scenario. 
More than this, ''There were also fragments of dialogue 
where dialogue was wanted to emphasize the situation and 
make it real. I was much struck with the writer's per- 
ception of the vast importance of dialogue in making a 
reader seize the scene. Description requires attention; 
dialogue rivets the attention." But neither Collins nor 
Dickens reduced their narrative material so far to dialogue 
as Reade. It is this trait of the Readean tale that Mr. 
Howells felt when he said: "You seem to be reading a 
dramatization of his novels rather than the novels them- 
selves." 

The extraordinary bulk in Reade, the multifarious pur- 
poses he makes it serve, and the rapidity with which it 
hastens on his typical scene are logical effects of his creed 
which criticism has largely neglected. The fact is that 

^ Quoted in Memoir of Charles Reade, p. 209. 
2 Besant's prefatory note to that story. 



204 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

from two fifths to one half the entire bulk of the character- 
istic novel by Reade consists of words in the mouth of some 
fictitious character. Peg Woffington and White Lies, both 
made originally from plays, have the highest percentage; 
A Terrible Temptation has two fifths. The famous prison 
episode in Never too Late, comprising about a third of the 
entire story and embodying one of the most virulent preach- 
ments that even Reade ever devised, is almost exactly one 
half dialogue or monologue. The relative amount would 
seem to be considerably less only in Griffith Gaunt, where 
Reade, taking a leaf from the book of the realists, tried his 
hand at a psychological study of jealousy. Still mere 
dependence on the spoken word of itself proves little. Dia- 
logue may, as the elder Dumas knew, be a very serviceable 
space filler. If three persons were asked to name the least 
dramatic of Victorian novelists, one at least would be sure 
to answer Benjamin Disraeli. Yet Sybil, for instance, is 
little more than a succession of dialogue. Bulwer, too, 
especially was fond of employing it to exhibit his acquaint- 
ance with art, politics, philosophy, what not — of making 
it serve, in short, many other than strictly narrative pur- 
poses. Absolutely speaking, however, without reference 
to other considerations the proportions cited from Reade 
are very high — higher probably than in any other novelist 
of his rank. TroUope's Warden, for example, is about one 
fifth dialogue. Felix Holt and The Mill on the Floss have 
slightly less than one third, Great Expectations slightly more 
than a third. But these instances demand a word more of 
explanation. Felix Holt and The Mill on the Floss depend 
more upon dialogue than later tales of George Eliot, not 
only because the expository-psychological method grew 
upon her with time, but because The Mill is notoriously 
out of proportion in the long conversations early in the book 
by means of which Mrs. TuUiver's relatives exhibit them- 



TRADITION OF TERRORISM IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL 205 

selves. The significance of Reade's dependence upon the 
spoken word is then not less in the relative amount than in 
its invariable employment to further narrative. Even 
his very partisan preachments against prison regimen are 
reduced to this narrative formula. 

If this reduction of the story to spoken words savors, as 
Mr. Howells intimates, overmuch of the stage, it neverthe- 
less imparts to Reade's scenes a rapidity which few novelists 
ever maintained. The dialogue is brisk in its rapid and 
constant interchange, unbookish, natural, weighted by no 
special significance beyond that which the words bear on 
their faces, always intended to get the story on with as 
little elaboration as might be. Hence current journalistic 
criticism, unaware of his real aim, sometimes counted it a 
defect that his tales had not the veiy elaboration which he 
made a principle of avoiding. It would have been much 
nearer the truth to say that few or no contemporaries rivaled 
him in getting done expeditiously a tremendous amount 
of narrative business. None of his rivals surely could have 
equaled the brevity and economy of style in the narrative of 
David Dodd's homecoming, or in the masterly exposition of 
the causes for the rift between Griffith Gaunt and his wife. 

This reduction of the story to the spoken word was only 
one phase of Reade's struggle for brevity. With it the 
determined minimization of set description and the con- 
temptuous avoidance of psychological analysis are consonant 
enough. He may choose to lay the scene in the mad house, 
where he is acquainted with both appliances and methods 
of dealing with patients, or in an island of the Pacific, where 
he knows the climate and vegetation like a mariner who has 
sailed those waters all his life, or in the Australian bush, 
where he knows with equal certainty the life of the mining 
camp or of the aborigine. How the native dresses, climbs a 
tree, follows a trail, or lights a fire — it was with things such 



206 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

as these that Reade made himself thoroughly familiar. 
The subject might involve asylums for the insane, forgery, 
or ship knackers ; he always had a fund of highly specialized 
information; but decorative description in the Radcliffian 
and Dickensian manner he contemned utterly, and except 
in The Cloister and the Hearth, where the spirited panorama 
of Gerard's journey to Italy indicated what he could do if 
he would, there is hardly background in the conventional 
sense in his stories at all. The old Cairnhope church in 
Put Yourself in his Place in which Little maintains the secret 
forge as he fights against the unions is the one external 
object in Reade's contemporary stories which lingers in 
memory. 

In sketching persons he is pithy but never detailed. ^'It 
is usual," he says of Jacky, the native of the brush in Never 
too Late, ''in works of this kind to give minute descriptions 
of people's dress. I fear I have often violated this rule. 
However, I will not in this case. Jacky's dress consisted of, 
in front, a sort of purse made of ratskin; behind, a bran 
new tomahawk and two spears." Guy Raby, the crusty 
Tory squire in Put Yourself in his Place, is epitomized in 
two trenchant sentences. ''He had a sovereign contempt 
for tradespeople, and especially for manufacturers. Any 
one of those numerous disputes between masters and me- 
chanics which distinguish British industry might have been 
safely referred to him, for he abhorred and despised them 
both with strict impartiality."^ The spirit of his entire 
fiction in this respect appears in Hard Cash, where Peterson, 
an Oxonian who has just seen Julia Dodd, "launches into 
a rapturous description of the lady's person well worth 
leaving out." This absence of detailed description is 
anomalous in Victorian fiction ; given Reade's stock of tech- 
nical information, from which he might have readily elabo- 
^ Put Yourself in his Place, ch. 1. 



TRADITION OF TERRORISM IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL 207 

rated such description, its absence can only mean that 
*'the drama" is always the primary consideration. His 
whole rhetoric is designed for the purpose of throwing rapid 
narrative into the boldest possible relief. 

In accordance with this principle of throwing the dramatic 
into high relief, he rejected psychological analysis and 
exposition almost entirely. "In life," he declared, "people 
don't come to you labeled, explanation in hand."^ His 
quarrel with realists like Tom Robertson and Trollope was 
thus a double one — their stuff was merely "the chronicle 
of small beer," their method was small and languorous. In 
his own words again, they describe with "marvelous accuracy 
the habits, manners, customs of animalcules as they might 
be seen under the microscope." Of Shilly Shally, the play 
which he made over from Trollope's Ralph the Heir without 
the novelist's consent, he averred: "Trollope as condensed 
by Reade succeeded by a law of nature." The same idea 
recurs in his dictum that George Eliot's style lacked "fire." 
The real importance of this tenet, however, appears best 
in concrete illustration. In Griffith Gaunt, Kate, the wife, 
an ardent Catholic, infatuates an eloquent priest, Father 
Leonard, who so far forgets his vows as to declare his love. 
"Her mind," says Reade, "was in a whirl; and were I to 
imitate those writers who undertake to dissect and analyze 
the heart at such moments, and put the exact result on 
paper, I should be apt to sacrifice truth to precision; I 
must stick to my old plan and tell you what she did; that 
will surely be some index to her mind, especially with my 
female readers." ^ The rest, of course, is mainly dialogue; 
and the conclusion of the scene is illustrative of the laconic 
nature of the comment which Reade 's dramatic rnethod 
imposes. Kate begs her husband to take her abroad, out 
of temptation's way; but he, like an oaf, objects that his 

^ Note at conclusion of Love me little. - Grifith Gaunt, ch. 13. 



208 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

hay is down. This obtuseness drives the impetuous woman 
frantic. At her rage ''Griffith smiled with that lordly 
superiority the male of our species sometimes wears when he 
is becoming like our dull ass; and smoked his pipe, and 
resolved to indulge her whim as soon as ever he got his hay 
in." Or again, in Foul Play, Helen Rolleston, the heroine, 
has to tell her betrothed that she has transferred her affec- 
tions to Penfold, the ticket-of-leave man. After she has 
made an appointment with Wardlaw, her affianced, for the 
next afternoon, the text goes — ''and so she retired, leaving 
him in ecstasies. This was the first downright assignation 
she had ever made with him. 

"They met at one o'clock; he as radiant as the sun and 
with a rose in his button-hole; she sad and somber with her 
very skin twitching at the thought of the explanation she 
had to go through." This is all that intervenes at a point 
where a Victorian realist would most likely have furnished 
a chapter of analysis or commentary. No contemporary so 
far abjured the novelists' prerogative of showing readers 
about and into his persons. More than another he de- 
liberately chose to impose upon himself the limitations 
which the stage necessarily imposes. Commentarj^ upon 
the persons, like decorative description, was merely a profane 
interruption of the sacred narrative. Hence the extraordi- 
nary amount of incident in Reade's novels. Almost anj^ one 
of them, indeed, contains enough to make a round half dozen 
of the kind usually accounted adventurous since his time. 

This negative creed of condensation and omission, however, 
tells only half the story. Reade went further; and to adopt 
a current phrase that the novelist appropriately might have 
invented, had a positive doctrine for '' putting over " his 
effects. In The Autobiography of a Thief, which purports 
to be written by Tom Robinson, whose reform is dealt with 
at length in Never wo Late, and to be revised by Mr. Eden, 



TRADITION OF TERRORISM IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL 209 

the model prison chaplain, the thief puts down "collected" 
or 'Hook with me" for "stole." Mr. Eden, who serves 
throughout the story as Reade's mouthpiece, comments 
characteristically upon the euphemism: "Never tamper 
with words; call a spade a spade, a picklock a picklock. 
That is the first step to digging instead of thieving." Or, 
as he put it in reference to some of his representations 
concerning dramatic copyright: "What I said to Maquet 
in vile French I have said over and over again to my own 
countrymen in some of the best English going. I mean 
by best, the plainest." One could not, Reade held, improve 
upon calling a spade a spade unless one printed a cut of 
it — a practice of which he was exceedingly fond. 

So then this sensation novelist, who was also an Oxford 
don and an LL.D., was a resolute champion of the Saxon vo- 
cabulary. The obliquity and ponderosity of the language of 
medicine and of the profession to which he was educated 
especially stirred his contempt. "The oleaginous periph- 
rasis" of physicians is satirized with Reade's customary 
heavy-handedness in the person of Dr. Wycherley, the alien- 
ist in Hard Cash. "In short," Reade makes that worthy 
say, as a final effort in clarifying a highly technical expla- 
nation of young Alfred Hardie's condition of mind, "it is 
the premonitory stage of the precursory condition of an or- 
ganic affection of the brain." ^ On the word brain the novel- 
ist comments: "What a blessing there are a few words left 
in all our dialects." Previously he had translated Wycher- 
ley's circumlocutions not unaccortipanied with and not un- 
disturbed by as plain accompanied and disturbed. His favorite 
characters are like their creator, who, as he remarked in 
comparing himself with George Eliot, "uses few words 
after his kind," just as she after her kind uses many. It is 
held equally to the credit of the reformed courtesan in A 

1 Hard Cash, ch. 24. 



210 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

Terrible Temptation who turns evangelist, and to that of 
Rolfe, the writer in the same story, who represents Reade 
himself, that they ''know how to speak the Saxon language." ^ 
In our early acquaintance with the young seaman, David 
Dodd, we learn that he *'had sucked in a good deal of lan- 
guage from books and tongues; not indeed the Norman- 
French and demi-Latin, and jargon of the schools, printed 
for English in impotent old trimestrials for the further 
fogification of cliques, but he had laid by a fair store of the 
best, of the monosyllables, the Saxon, the soul and vestal 
fire of the great English tongue. So he was never at a loss 
for words, simple, clear, strong, like the blasts of a horn." 
Stray papers, passages in the novels such as these, and the 
whole texture of his narratives leave it doubtful whether 
Reade abominated most euphemism or inkhorn terms. 

The result is a restless, virile English — energetic, full 
of fire and color, unmistakably masculine at all times. 
Whatever it wants of melody, tenderness, grace, it is evident 
that Reade desiderated quite other qualities. He needed 
and he evolved a medium for the kind of effect at which his 
narrative aimed; and so excellent was that medium for the 
purpose that even Trollope, who held dramatic fiction as 
cheap as Reade held the Barsetshire series, praised the 
brightness and spirit of Reade's scenes unreservedly. The 
author of Hard Cash would have found Schopenhauer's 
gruff dictum — that the problem of style consists in having 
something to say and in saying it — the most perfect ex- 
pression of the whole matter. This unique narrative style, 
with its business-like repudiation of ornament, lyrical effect, 
and sentiment, would have seemed more at home had it 
come from an Englishman of a century earlier or of half 
a century later. Its close kinship with eighteenth-century 
ideals and its anticipation of later journalistic manner are 

^ Love me little, ch. 3. 



TRADITION OF TERRORISM IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL 211 

evident. Pretty much all that romantic rhetoric meant, 
save its desire for effect, was lost upon Reade. 

This anomalous Saxon brevity was not enough for a 
thorough-going sensationalist like Reade. The boredom 
of readers is always a matter of unusual importance to 
romancers of his kind; but none of his stature in English 
has had quite the courage to provide against the contin- 
gency by such unconventional devices. He steadily counted 
on the singular appearance of his printed page to stimulate 
attention. It is an excessively broken page, abounding in 
sentence paragraphs, tricks with the type, and unique 
childish illustrations which recall the vagaries of Sterne 
and of Dickens. No one knew better the superior attractive- 
ness of the broken page or used it more invariably. It is 
not merely that the exceptional bulk of Reade's dialogue 
tends in this direction, nor is it merely that he is studiously 
brief in exposition and set description. He broke the 
essential minimum of these into small, readily absorbed 
fragments, and thus made the printer serve his sensation 
principles. Chapter X of Hard Cash, in which the storm 
breaks upon Dodd's ship, the Agra, ends with about forty 
paragraphs quite free from dialogue. The longest of these 
is about two hundred words, the shortest contains but 
two words. There are others consisting of four and seven 
respectively. The average here, from sixty to seventy, 
is representative of Reade's customary practice. In Griffith 
Gaunt, George Neville, who feels that he has been Hghtly 
used by Kate Peyton, writes four notes of reproof, no one 
of which suits him. Each note is described in one sentence; 
the four are parallel in construction, and each constitutes 
a paragraph by itself. In the same story, when Mrs. Gaunt 
is about to appear before the court in her own defense, 
Reade sketches the scene in a succession of twenty-five 
consecutive sentence-paragraphs. All this looks like imi- 



212 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

tation of French prose — more specifically perhaps, imitation 
of Eugene Sue and Dumas the elder; if it was so, however, 
enough has been said previously to indicate that there is 
nothing remotely Gallic in its idiom. How far removed such 
broken pages are from the conventional prose of the Victorian 
novel one needs only to open to any chapter of exposition 
or description at random to ascertain. It will be found that 
the passages comparable to this, not only in TroUope and 
George EUot but even in Bulwer and Dickens, tend to ob- 
serve the general paragraph length of present-day prose — • 
say from one hundred and fifty to about two hundred and 
fifty words. 

Reade ignored more conventions than this, however. 
The printer's devil had a more active part to play in his 
style than in that of any of his contemporaries — for he 
calls where he chooses for large type and for small, for 
italics, and for illustrations generally thought to be in 
place only in primers. When Mrs. Gaunt 's intimacy with 
Father Leonard is becoming dangerous, she and the servant, 
as they arrange his room, discover among his keepsakes a 
woman's glove. Upon examining it, the servant squawks 
out in big type — LAWK A MERCY; IT'S YOUR OWN, 
and the curtain falls. The fight between David Dodd's 
ship and the pirate is at its height when the cabin boy runs 
up to the captain with the information that the ammunition 
is low. The lad's whisper is represented by diamond type. 
Again Tom Robinson proposes: ''Don't cry so, dear girl. 
IVe got a question to ask you. IF I COME BACK A 
BETTER MAN THAN I GO, WILL YOU BE MRS. 
ROBINSON?" The final word in the chapter is the 
woman's small typed ''yes." Still again when Kate Peyton 
finally accepts Griffith Gaunt she enjoins him: "You make 
me plight my troth with you whether I LIKE IT OR 
NOT." 



TRADITION OF TERRORISM IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL 213 

The purpose of this chicanery with the type — to render 
visible the tone for that tremendous final sentence before 
the curtain falls, and for the stage whisper — would be 
unmistakable did we not have Reade's own justification 
for them. As explanation to similar procedure in It is Never 
too Late to Mend he appends a note to the effect that ''these 
imprecations are printed on the ascending scale by way of 
endeavor to show how the speaker delivered them." In 
the same category come his cuts — that graphic represen- 
tation of Uncle Fountain's mind in Love me little, which re- 
veals the county as larger than Britain, and Britain larger 
than the world, or the sketches of the Southern Cross and 
of the knife with the nuggets clinging to it in Never too 
Late. How seriously he took these unconventionalities may 
be inferred from a portion of one of his letters to Ticknor 
& Fields, his American publishers. ''I cannot help feel- 
ing some anxiety about your woodcuts, and this anxiety 
is increased by your silence, which leads me to fear I have 
not succeeded in showing you the importance of those 
effects I aim at by them. These are no vulgar illustrations; 
they are not done upon the common plan of illustrations. 
They take the place of text, and the reader reads them as 
well as views them."^ The tombstones and knives must be 
like, he insists, or both they and the text must be omitted. 
Reade's taste was not that of the formalist. The strange 
fact is that few narrative prose styles have so little needed 
meretricious aids such as these. But Reade never en- 
dangered being understood even by the dullest. For him 
the writer who refuses to attain the desired effect by the 
readiest means was simply a fool. 

In a style thus studiously brief and sensational the main 
characteristics of Victorian sensationalism at its best stand 

^ The Century Magazine, November, 1884, p. 67. A letter to Ticknor 
& Fields. 



214 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

out sharply. Reade was vain and eccentric enough more 
than once naively to express in print his unbounded admira- 
tion of his own genius. Of Foul Play he once wrote anony- 
mously: ''It is a novel of immense power, of the greatest 
originality, and is one of his works that shows best the 
boundless resources of the writer. This feature must 
strike every reader of Charles Reade's novels; his resource 
is unlimited; his incidents, novel and striking, yet always 
possible and natural, follow one another with startling 
rapidity. Foul Play showed off to perfection his ingenuity." ^ 
His aims rightly understood, this judgment may be allowed 
to stand almost intact. Like his "brother in the art" 
Collins, he did the things he intended so well that the main 
question is whether the thing itself was worth the pains 
and art lavished upon it. For after all the brilliance is 
mostly at the surface; his novels read as if they had more 
significance while you hold the book than they really possess. 
Their tremendous energy and kaleidoscopic vividness and 
variety of incident have little real meaning. Their vir- 
tuosity is still amazing — only less so than Collins's ; but 
it is the virtuosity of a man more in love with the glare of the 
footlights than that of common day. Not even Stevenson 
was more exclusively and hopelessly a writer of story books. 
Whatever else may have operated in limiting Reade 's 
work to an exercise of professional dexterity in narrative 
art — and there were other influences such as his pre- 
occupation with books, the theater, and academic life — it 
is clear that the narrative creed tended in the same direc- 
tion. The whole scheme minimized character interest. 
Neither he nor Collins realized that either character or 
intrigue must be in the ascendant. The consequence is that 
most Readean folk, like Collins's, slip quickly out of mind. 
Among his men Denys the Burgundian in The Cloister and 

1 Bookman, 18: 252. 



TRADITION OF TERRORISM IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL 215 

the Hearth, David Dodd, and the eccentric Dr. Sampson in 
Hard Cash are something more than stalking horses for 
exciting melodrama. The generality of his heroes, manly, 
likable fellows enough, who are ready to fight hard, love 
truly, and endure, have little identity apart from the story 
which they help to carry on. When Henry Little in his 
fight with the unions meets Grotait, the organization leader 
at an inn, to settle their differences, he rips out the toast — 
''Here's quick exposure, sudden death, and sure damnation 
to all hypocrites and assassins." The action and the sen- 
timent are tolerable expression of the reason for being of 
George Fielding, Penfold, and the others. About them 
personally we have small concern; where they will ''come 
out" we feel tolerably sure. They play their assigned part 
in the melodrama acceptably, but we leave them little the 
wiser ourselves, without having made new friends of them. 
"Fertile situations," as Reade understood and applied the 
term, practically precluded that. 

With his women the matter is somewhat different. Mr. 
Howells feels that Reade knew the other sex better than 
Thackeray or Dickens and could "paint their manners, 
if not their minds, better than both his betters put together." 
He also ascribes to Reade the creation of the "coquette 
nianquee,'' by which he means "a flirt in whom the impulse 
of flirtation is arrested or interrupted by a throe of conscience 
or a thrill of passion, and who for peace's sake or love's 
sake is willing to forego the pleasure of winning a heart to 
no other end than feeling it hers." A gallant man, Reade, 
in truth, always found that period when young womanhood 
is first conscious of lovers — while the unsophistication of 
girlhood still lingers in the maturing woman — especially 
fascinating, and drew upon it for his best characterizations. 
Lucy Fountain, Julia Dodd, and Kate Peyton are charm- 
ingly fresh specimens of conceivable girlhood. But Reade's 



216 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

scope was limited. More ambitious attempts — that to 
realize Peg Woffington or Mrs. Gaunt — show the same 
weakness as the men. The drama and the style of Reade 
too arbitrarily condition and repress their individuality. It 
would be difficult to find a better conception for melodrama 
than that in Peg Woffington or to make a happier choice 
of heroine. But in the interests of drama she is put through 
the absurd picture scene, which, as Swinburne remarks, 
is good only to make the fortunes of a farce; and the pathos 
of a wronged wife's appeal to a stronger and victorious 
rival is lost in garish theatrical clap-trap. Likewise, Mrs. 
Gaunt, for the most part an admirable study in ardent 
heroic womanhood, Portia-like, becomes her own advocate 
in trial for murder, and delivers a plea of which the seasoned 
barrister need not be ashamed. That is, if Reade's excessive 
objection to analysis necessitated, according to common 
canons of fiction, some shadowiness of character, he increased 
the difficulty by ruthlessly subordinating his persons to the 
exigencies of his drama. Such things as these, we have seen, 
Reade held to be ^Hhe true cream of fiction." The result 
is the frequent vulgarization of such real drama — conflict 
of character — as his stories contain. Situation and climax 
crash down upon his readers like well-aimed blows of a 
single stick player, until they are battered into a kind of 
emotional insensibility that nothing but floods or earth- 
quakes can touch. The method defeats itself by excess of 
the quality it aimed at. Reade's ponderous folios of clip- 
pings never taught him that the inhabitants of certain 
regions of the earth learn to five unmoved in the neighbor- 
hood of earthquakes and volcanoes. 

There are more egregious sacrifices to the creed than 
Peg Woffington. Griffith Gaunt, a finely conceived tragedy 
of alienation of husband and wife, is disfigured by the 
introduction of Caroline Ryder, Mrs. Gaunt's maid, whom 



TRADITION OF TERRORISM IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL 217 

Reade describes as '*a female rake." Without this wretched 
creature, who exists mainly in order to bear tales and solicit 
her mistress's husband, the situation has all the potentialities 
of grave and affecting tragedy; the wife high spirited, ardent, 
a devout Romanist, the husband an ale-drinking squire 
and lukewarm Protestant who rises above being a mere 
oaf by virtue of a jealous affection for his wife. Reade 
never wrote better, not even in The Cloister and the Hearth^ 
than in the early chapters of Griffith, in which the rift be- 
tween Kate and her husband appears. With the intro- 
duction of the eloquent but youthful Father Leonard the 
material for tragedy is complete; but in the passion for 
concreteness, the desire to make the plot work by visible 
and tangible means, he imposes upon the story this personi- 
fication of falsehood and lust — a gross, nasty blot upon a 
finely human and pathetic drama of misunderstanding. 
His ''drama" justified the outcry of ''carrion" that Goldwin 
Smith raised. There is a more notorious instance of this 
vulgarization in A Terrible Temptation, which has as its 
problem — given a doting but childless wife to a man whose 
heart is set on having a son and heir, how will the woman's 
ingenuity deal with the situation? In this romantic world 
of Reade 's, of course, Providence will ultimately provide 
the heir. The novelist's immediate answer, however, is 
that a Bella Bassett will almost succumb to the temptation 
of palming off the child of another for her own. But for 
our dramatist this sensational answer is somewhat tame; 
and so he provides a cheap mystification in which we are 
led to suspect that she has a child by a Mr. Angelo, a clergy- 
man. Both clergyman and wife, it is almost needless to 
say, are models of rectitude. The paltry obfuscation is 
there large in Reade 's pages, let him roar in footnotes and 
appendix in attempted palliation however he will; and the 
instance points clearly enough to a practical working prin- 



218 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

ciple of which he was probably never aware; that of never 
letting a character stand in the way of an effect. 

The heated controversies in which Reade urged his pri- 
ority over George Eliot are no longer debatable. The pit, 
the decision of which he knew to be final, has long since 
decided against him. The reason is largely that he was 
less a student of life than a doctrinaire virtuoso in narrative 
art. He is like performers at the vaudeville who climb 
six rounds of the ladder balanced upon the slack wire and 
then balance themselves upon one foot. The feat is a 
marvel of skill but has no especial significance to-morrow. 
The certainty of his skill, the vigor, the rapidity in his 
workmanship are those of the virtuoso in his craft. Further- 
more, from the very definiteness of the creed Reade's work 
gave him the finest of all satisfactions in art — that of 
achieving one's design with distinction; for it is stupid 
to see nothing more than arrogance and vanity in the man's 
naive self-praise. He is mainly voicing a wrongheaded 
faith in his creed. But if we ask ourselves whither his 
example tended, what helpful inspiration came from it, 
the answer for all Reade's singularly original genius — in- 
deed largely because of it — is unmistakable. The style 
was specialized so highly as at times to be almost burlesque. 
He left few or no successors within the domain of literature 
proper. Just as he appropriated some of the least admirable 
traits of his master, so in turn he furnished hints useful 
mainly in the craft of writers who a generation ago turned 
off reams of stories in yellow covers. For what Dickens 
was to Reade, Reade was to the dime novel of our boyhoods. 

Summary 

''Sensation novel" was Victorian parlance for romance 
for the populace. Its especial bailiwick was the twopenny, 
sixpenny, or even the shilling miscellany. It affected 



TRADITION OF TERRORISM IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL 219 

particularly contemporaneity and depended primarily upon 
the appeal to fear. It was the narrative of villainy, violence, 
and crime; a delineation of the abnormal, the terrible, and 
the hideous in some measure for their own sake. To this 
romance of contemporary life the Dickens group added 
what they believed to be a scrupulous dependence upon 
fact, and sought to achieve a refinement in method by 
adapting more than fellow novelists the mode of expression 
that is necessary for the play. More specifically, they 
favored unusual reliance upon incident and dialogue to 
reveal character, emphasis upon the number and intensity 
of climaxes, and avoidance of psychological exposition. 
Such a scheme of narrative assumes the priority of in- 
cident, situation, and plot over character and humor. This 
position brought them into sharp and resolute contrast with 
the realists. The opposition appears most sharply between 
Reade and George Eliot, who represent the Victorian ex- 
tremes of their respective groups. This more or less dis- 
tinctive form of sensation fiction Dickens and his friends 
liked to call the dramatic novel. 

The dramatic novel was molded by three influences 
chiefly — by the trade conditions resulting from the rise of 
the democratic audience, by devotion of the group to the 
theater and its methods, and by the tradition of terrorism 
in the English novel. Trade conditions and the circum- 
stances which evoked them afford the clue to the spirit of 
their work and largely determined its form. Instalment 
writing clearly tended to accentuate the favorite devices 
of their narrative; but the probability is that, so far as the 
Dickensians are concerned, the effects of serial writing may 
easily be overemphasized; for their parallel of novel and 
play implies reliance upon much the same narrative expe- 
dients that serialism is popularly held accountable for. 
Whatever may have been the effect of publication in shilling 



220 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

pamphlet or All the Year Round, there exists beneath it 
and independently of it this dogma of the dramatic, which 
is to the Dickensians what the foreword to Vanity Fair 
or to Pendennis was to Thackeray, or what the preface to 
La comedie humaine was to Balzac. Attempts at distinction 
between the effects of serial writing and those of their belief 
in drama upon their narrative form are futile. One set 
reinforces the other; in effect they are inextricable. 

As a Uterary tradition the history of sensationalism is 
essentially the history of the rise of the melodramatic method 
in the English novel since the third quarter of the eighteenth 
century. It is the lineal descendant not of Scott but of 
Gothicism; and the direct connection between the two is to 
be sought in the career of the picturesque ruffian who 
served as hero for Mrs. Radcliffe, Byron, and Bulwer- 
Lytton. This hero, the most frequently repeated figure 
in English romances of the first four decades of the century, 
from the very conception he embodied, was invariably 
draped with garish melodrama. Schedoni-Lara-Aram in- 
deed is less important as a person than as a prop for a method. 
He was merely a chameleon-like obsession of novelists about 
whom there developed a perennial species of narrative art. 

Adherence to their code has cost the Dickensians dear. 
The younger men achieved two or three stories each which 
are still read and an honorable mention among the lesser 
folk in Victorian letters. The vogue of realism brought the 
reputation of Dickens to its nadir perhaps at the end of his 
century. His power in other than sensational narrative, 
aided somewhat no doubt by judicious interpretation, has 
won approbation anew at the beginning of the next. His 
satellites may be rejuvenated by the cinematograph, hardly 
by other means. Nothing in letters becomes antiquated 
so speedily as the sensationalism of yesterday. As Melmoth 
in 1820 seemed hectic blasphemous rubbish, so nowadays 



TRADITION OF TERRORISM IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL 221 

the high tragedy of the Victorians is esteemed rant or un- 
conscious burlesque. Edith Dombey's declamation in the 
French inn provokes a smile, and Bill Sikes's ghastly death 
has become proverbial of turgid rhetoric. The modernist 
who patronizes it may at least remember that it represents 
the conscious and deliberate code of sincere artists. 

The sincere devotion of Dickens, Reade, and Collins to 
their sensational art had its significance for later makers of 
fiction. They not only fought valiantly to free their craft 
from the shackles of philistinism, but they have the honor 
among the English of first perceiving and emphasizing the 
dramatic method which has since become a platitude of 
narrative theory. The Victorian novel, with its bias toward 
the realistic, domestic, especially needed the quaUties upon 
which they insisted; and their methods, though not their 
materials, looked forward to and anticipated the defter 
workmanship of a later time. The dramatic dogma put 
the emphasis where it belongs in a deliberate attempt to 
represent the dramatis personae in a livelier and more 
graphic way than had been attempted previously; and 
whatever exaggeration of pantomime and of passion it 
encouraged in Dickens, or willful repudiation of right and 
necessary modes of expression for the novelist in Reade, it 
served as a check and corrective for the prosier method to 
which the domestic variety was prone. 



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(1) Autobiography, New York, 1902 

(2) The Pen and the Book, London, 1899 
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Life and Times of Henry, Lord Brougham, 3 vols. 1871 
Bulwer-Lytton 

Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of Edward Bvlwer, Lord Lytton, 
by his Son, 2 vols., London, 1882 
Burn AND, Sir F. C. 

Records and Reminiscences. Personal and General, London, 1904 
Cazamain, Louis 

Le Roman social en Angleterre, Paris, 1906 

COCKBURN, H. T. 

Life of Lord Jeffrey, with a Selection from his Correspondence, 2 vols. 
Constable, Thomas 

Archibald Constable and his Literary Correspondents; A Memorial 
by his Son, 3 vols., Edinburgh, 1873 
Cross, J. W. 

George Eliot's Life as Related in her Letters and Journals, 3 vols. 
CuRWEN, Henry 

A History of the Booksellers, London, n.d. 
Dolby, George 

Charles Dickens as I Knew Him, New York, 1912 
Filon, Augustin 

The English Stage, Being an Account of the Victorian Drama, New 
York, 1897 
FoRSTER, John 

The Life of Charles Dickens, 3 vols. 
Fox Bourne, H. R. 

English Newspapers; Chapters in the History of Journalism, 2 vols., 
London, 1887 
Gates, Lewis E. 

Three Studies in Literature (Jeffrey), New York, 1899 

223 



224 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

Gordon, Mrs. Mary 

Christopher North; A Memoir of John Wilson^ Compiled from Family 
Papers 
Harrison, Frederic 

Studies in Early Victorian Literature, London, 1906 
Hunt, Leigh 

Autobiography, revised by the Author, with further Revision, and an 
Introduction by his Eldest Son, London, 1860 
Jeffrey, Francis 

Contributions to the Edinburgh Review, Philadelphia, 1843 
Jordan, William 

Autobiography, 4 vols., London, 1852 
Kent, C. B. Roylance 

The English Radicals, 2 vols., London, 1899 
Knight, Charles 

Passages of a Working Life during Half a Century, 3 vols., London, 
1873 
Lang, Andrew 

The Life and Letters of John Gibson Lockhart, 2 vols. 
LocKHART, John Gibson 

Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott 
Mackenzie, R. S. 

Life of Charles Dickens, Philadelphia, 1870 
Mackenzie, R. S. 

The Fraserian Papers of the Late William Maginn, LL.D., with a 
Life of the Author, New York, 1857 
Marzials, F. T. 

Life of Charles Dickens, Great Writer Series 
Melville, Lewis 

The Life of William Makepeace Thackeray, 2 vols., Chicago and 
New York, 1899 

Some Aspects of Thackeray, Boston, 1913 
Meynell, Wilfred 

Benjamin Disraeli; An Unconventional Biography 
MiTTON, Geraldine Edith 

Jane Austen and her Times, London, 1905 
Oliphant, Mrs. Margaret 

Annals of a Publishing House; William Blackwoods and his Sons, 
3 vols., Edinburgh and London, 1907 
Payn, James 

Some Literary Recollections, London, 1884 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 225 

Reade, Charles 

The Eighth Commandment 
Russell, G. W. E. 

Sydney Smith, English Men of Letters Series 
Saintsbury, George 
The English Novel 
The Sampson Low Trade Catalogues, London, 1863 and after 
Shore, W. F. T. 

Charles Dickens and his Friends, London, 1909 
Scott, Clement 

The Drama of Yesterday and Today, 2 vols., London, 1899 
Scott, Sir Walter 

Sketch of Mrs. Radcliffe in Biographical Memoirs. Prefatory 
matter to various Waverley Novels, especially to Guy Mannering^ 
Old Mortality, Kenilworth, The Abbott, The Mormstery 
Smiles, Samuel 

A Publisher and his Friends: Memoir and Correspondence 
of John Murray, with an Account of the Origin and Prog- 
ress of the Publishing House, 1768-1843, 2 vols., London, 
1891 
Trollope, Anthony 

Autobiography 
Walker, Hugh 

(1) The Literature of the Victorian Period, London, 1913 

(2) The English Essay, London, 1916 
Ward, A. W. 

Charles Dickens, English Men of Letters Series 
Wheatley, Henry B. 

The Prices of Books; An Inquiry into the Changes in the Price of 
Books which have Occurred in England at Different ^Periods, 
London, 1898 

Bibliography of the Newgate Novel 
Representative fictions 
Paul Clifford 
Eugene Aram 

The Autobiography of Jack Ketch 
Rookwood 
Oliver Twist 
Jack Sheppard 
Catherine 



226 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

Magazine Articles 

Fraser's (1) Epistles to the Literati, No. I to E. L. Bulwer, vol. II, 
pp. 520 ff., December, 1831 

(2) Mr. Edward Lytlon Bulwer^s Novels; and Remarks on 

Novel Writing, vol. I, pp. 509 fif., June, 1830 

(3) A Good Tale Badly Told (review of Eugene Aram), leading 

article for February, 1832 

(4) Elizabeth Brownrigge (burlesque of Eugene Aram), vol. VI, 

pp. 67 ff.-127 ff., (two instalments), August, 1832 

(5) Hints for a History of Highwaymen (review of Whitehead's 

Lives and Exploits of English Highwaymen, Pirates, 
and Robbers), vol. XX, pp. 279 ff., March, 1834 

(6) Highways and Low-ways, or Ainsworth^s Dictionary, with 

Notes on Turpin (review of Rookwood), vol. IX, p. 724, 
June, 1834 

(7) Another Caw from Roodwood; Turpin Out Again (review 

of third edition of Rookwood), vol. XIII, p. 488, 
April, 1836 

(8) Cathenne, vol. XIX, p. 604 (first number), May, 1839 
Quarterly Review, vol. XLVIII, p. 391 

Lockhart on Bulwer's romances; article entitled Zohrah the 
Hostage 
Edinburgh Review, vol. LXV, p. 209 
Mr. Bulwer's Novels 

Miscellaneous 

Bulwer's (1) Preface to Eugene Aram, edition of 1840 

(2) A Ward to the Public, 1847 
Chandler, F. W. The Literature of Roguery, 2 vols., Boston, 1907 
Dickens's Preface to Oliver Twist 
Melville, Lewis 

Some Aspects of Thackeray, Boston, 1913 
Chapter 4, "Thackeray and the Newgate Novel" 

Dickens Material 

(1) Prefaces 

Oliver Twist, Old Curiosity Shop, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, 
and A Tale of Two Cities 

(2) Dr. Dulcamara, M. P. (jointly with Wilkie Collins), leading 

article for All the Year Round, December 18, 1858 

(3) Letters of Charles Dickens, edited by his Sister-in-law and his 

Eldest Daughter, 3 vols., London, 1880-1882 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 227 

(4) Charles Dickens as Editor, being Letters Written by him to 

William Henry Wills his Sub-editor, New York, 1912 

(5) Letters from Charles Dickens to Wilkie Collins, edited by R. H. 

Hutton 

(6) Dickensiana, F. G. Kitton, London, 1886 

(7) Charles Dickens and his Friends, W. F. T. Shore, London, 1909 
The following are specific letters from Letters of Charles Dickens 

Vol. I, pp. 77 and 78. Dickens's prologue to Marston's play 

The Patrician's Daughter 

pp. 174-175 To the Reverend Edward Tagart, Dickens's opinion 

of Richardson 
pp. 210-211 To M. de Cerjal — note on Copperfield 
p. 292 To Mrs. Gaskell 
p. 293 To Mrs. Gaskell 
p. 294 To Wilkie Collins on Bant 
p. 352 To Chas. Knight in approval of the public's reading 

novels 
p. 356 Postscript of letter to Frank Stone — Dickens's estimate 

of relative worth of Smollett's novels 
p. 359 To Miss Hogarth — urging merits of CoUins's Hide and 
Seek, which had not especially pleased her 
pp. 370-71 To Mrs. Watson on the difficulties of writing Hard 
Times 

Volume II 

p. 98 To John Forster describing the nature of his attempt in 
A Tale of Two Cities 

p. 110 To Wilkie Collins on The Woman in White 

p. 116 To Bulwer-Lytton on the authorities for A Tale of Two 
Cities and the adventitious in plot 

p. 249 To Mrs. Brookfield — directions for serial publication 
and general criticism of a novel of hers 

p. 276 Advising a young writer against attempting a three- 
volume story at the first attempt 

p. 437 Advising another young writer against exploiting his 
talent 

Volume III 
p. 159 To Mrs. Gaskell on the divisions for serial publication 
of a story of hers 



228 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

p. 162 To Miss King in general criticism of a narrative for 
Household Woi'ds 

p. 164 To the same 

p. 173 To Miss Emily Jolly — general criticism 

p. 175 To the same 

p. 181 To the same 

p. 183 To the same 

p. 190 To H. F. Chorley on Roccabella 

p. 198 To Bulwer on publication in All the Year Round of A 
Strange Story 
pp. 198-199 To the same 
pp. 200-203 To the same 

p. 209 To the same 

p. 210 To the same 

Charles Dickens as Editor, New York, 1912 

p. 128 Concerning Miss Furbey, a story for Household Words 
p. 141 Concerning North and South — serial method 
p. 145 Concerning North and South — serial method 
p. 161 Criticism of a story by Wills suggestive of Bleak House 
pp. 166-167 Letter concerning story by Miss Emily Jolly 
pp. 168-189 Letter concerning stories by Harriet Parr, Miss 

Lynn, Miss Jolly 
p. 218 Terms for A Rogue's Life 

p. 221 Engagement of Wilkie Collins for Household Words 
p. 222 Engagement of Wilkie Collins for Household Words 
p. 238 Engagement of Wilkie Collins for Household Words 
p. 255 Dickens's instructions to Wills concerning Collins and 

his paper Dr. Dulcamara, M.P. 
p. 281 Interview between Reade and Dickens concerning 

Reade's contributing to All the Year Round 
p. 303 Resumption of same subject 
p. 307 Suggesting alterations in Wilkie Collins's No Name, 

which was in course of serial publication in All the 

Year Round 
p. 322 Letter concerning divisions for serial publication of Mrs. 

Gaskell's A Dark Night's Work 
p. 323 Suggestion of name for Reade's story (Hard Cash); 

Dickens offered as alternative Safe as the Bank 
p. 360 Dickens's opinion of The Moonstone 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 229 

Charles Reade Material 

(1) Readiana — Chatto and Windus's edition, pp. 260-312, com- 

prising following essays: 
A Terrible Temptation, A Suppressed Letter, Foul Play, The 
Sham Sample Swindle, It is Never too Late to Mend, The Pru- 
rient Prude, Second-hand Libel, Facts must he faced. 

(2) Anonymous comparison of himself and George Eliot, reprinted 

in The Bookman, vol. 18, pp. 252 ff. 

(3) The Charge of Plagiarism, Refuted, reprinted in most editions 

with The Wandering Heir, the novel which gave rise to the 
controversy. 

(4) Reade 's notes on The Autobiography of a Thief, Chatto and 

Windus's edition. 

(5) An Acquaintance with Charles Reade, with Letters hitherto un- 

published, by Annie Fields, Century Magazine, November, 
1884, pp. 67 ff. (The letters mostly concern the publication 
of Reade's novels in America. They are addressed to Mr. 
Fields of Ticknor and Fields of Boston.) 

(6) Charles Reade as I knew Him, by John Coleman, London, 

1904. (This book cites Reade's opinions throughout; 
especially important is Bk. Ill, Ch. II, Life at Albert Gate, 
pp. 246 ff.) 

(7) Memoir of Charles Reade, by Charles L. Reade and the Reverend 

Compton Reade, New York, 1887. (As in Coleman's 
biography Reade's opinions on fiction are to be found 
throughout. Especially important are Chapters XV, 
pp. 177 ff., and XXVIII, pp. 380 ff.) 

Collins Material 

Works of Wilkie Collins, Chatto and Windus's edition 

Basil, Letter of Dedication, to Charles James Ward, dated 1862 

Armadale, Preface, 1866 

The Dead Secret, Preface, 1861 

Blind Love, Preface by Sir Walter Besant 

JezebeVs Daughter, Letter of dedication to Alberto Caccia, trans- 
lator, 1880 

Heart and Science, (1) to readers in general; (2) to readers in 
particular, 1883 

Hide and Seek, Preface, 1861 

The Law and the Lady, note addressed to the reader, 1875 



230 DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS 

Poor Miss Finch, Dedication to Mrs. Elliot, January, 1872. 

note to a second edition, November, 1872 
No Name, Preface, 1862 
A RogiLe's Life, Introductory Words, 1879 
The Two Destinies, Dedication to Charles Reade, 1876 
Letter to Charles Reade concerning Put Yourself in His Place, 
reprinted in A Memoir of Charles Reade, by Charles L. Reade 
and the Reverend Compton Reade, New York, 1887, p. 343. 
My Miscellanies — two articles 

(1) Petition to Novel Writers 

(2) The Unknown Public 



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